Slashdot Mirror
IBM (Offically) Launches Linux Box Clustering
Neumsy writes " IBM has offically announced that it is releasing Linux-Based Server, Software Packages. Yahoo! News has the story . According to IBM, this will expand the use of Linux. It's a good overview article. Not too much in depth, but still nice to see Linux getting out there more and more."
The commercials weren't lying about IBM selling Linux servers?!?!?!?!
;-)
Maybe I outta start believing marketing people? Nahh....
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Since Quake III Arena is multi-threaded, would it be possible to run it on some sort of cluster? If not, or if there is, is there any other game that is capable of playing on a cluster?
Mind you, it would need a fair bit of bandwidth I'd bet.
...this business move won't put IBM too much into "debth."
daed si luap
A lot of people seem to confuse what the posters say (which is in quotes btw) and what the Slashdot crew says. Of course, either is just as likely to be spelled incorrectly :).
Interestingly enough, just this morning I saw a two-page ad for IBM servers running linux. I haven't found the actual ad online, but it showed the famous "bigfoot" photo, labeled as fake, and then a penguin walking through the server room in the same pose, labeled as real. The other page of the ad was an abbreviated list of the usual Linux myths that we all know and love, with IBM-specific arguments as to why these were no longer true. This is the real fruit of the $1 billion campaign from IBM, and a great answer for your hesitant management.
IBM's main page for this, aimed at upper brass rather than engineering, is at http://www.ibm.com/linux/cio2, and the myths seemed to come from this brochure: http://www.ibm.com/linux/Demystifying_Linux_Brochu re.pdf.
Maybe this isn't entirely on-topic, but I thought it was a great example of some more of that good mindshare. And this time IBM isn't going to have to scrub off any sidewalk paint :)
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
"Linux is appealing because of its price and performance, which can be less than with a comparable Unix-based system, Quandt said."
Sounds great...oh, wait, no it doesn't.
IBM has a winner. For organizations which can use more computing muscle, particularly in scientific computing, clustering is true blessing. The real beauty is that an organization can "test the waters" without an outrageous investment in hardware. When budgets are thin, clustering allows you to start small, and then ramp up as the benefits warrant it financially. Here is a lucrative niche for which IBM's expertise is ideally suited.
Its always refreshing to hear corps stress the benefits of this OS ..
a re /
http://www-4.ibm.com/software/is/mp/linux/softw
Well acording to this article, it sounds like Corp America isnt tech savy enough to run linux without nice gui point and click conf interfaces. Figures...
I will bend your mind with my spoon
http://www.ibm.com/news/us/2001/11/13.html
I wonder whether IBM will bring out bewoulf clusters, It is too hard to get any good software for bewoulf. Maybe IBM may finally give up unix and come home to linux. Ps : I am looking for a 3d Rendering farm using clusters any idea ?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
It's good to see more linux successes. MS has really been perking up though. Take, for example, the recent link here to the leaked memo to theregister where linux is stated to be the threat. http://slashdot.org/articles/01/11/12/136243.shtml MS has really been perking up. Check out this little tidbit; looks like MS is now dumping copies of winxp at universities to try and combat the fact that intelligent people are using other systems. http://www.browndailyherald.com/stories.cfm?S=0&ID =5668 The MS drones are already out in force; you should leave a little feedback...
So, what Wine has to do is to be vmware , isn't it ?
They even probably have a marketing department.
Boy, I'd really like to see a Beowulf cluster of those!
What? Oh, okay - never mind...
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
In the corporate market, most Linux installations are going to come in as X servers and thin clients (see ltsp). This has huge advantages for maintenance and support, as well as hardware upgrade paths.
In this case, wine, or other emulators, are not necessarily the best solution for legacy windows apps. Look at using windows 2000 terminal server to host the windows apps and rdesktop to access them from the clients. Very simple to integrate and maintain. The drawback is the cost of the seats on windows 2000 terminal server - but that cost will certainly be offset by the cost orf managing and debugging an emulator.
Of course, terminal server / emulator is to be thought of as a temporary solution until the legacy app is ported to something which is client independent.
What's even more fun is that Linux has now received some serious television advertising. Up until now (at least in my area) the only "advertising" Linux has received has been the mention of Linux as a possible training route at the computer schools popping up all over the place, as well as being lumped in with all the "UNIX systems that will crash at Y2K because it's so old, but you don't have to worry because nobody uses UNIX any more." -- that was said on one of the news stations here. I sent an e-mail to the channel's producers explaining to them that the use UNIX every day to run their servers (they were running Solaris), produce their graphics (they were running IRIX), and so on. I never heard back from them.
Anyway, this advertising thing is something I've been wishing I could do for a long time. It's one of the few things still really holding Linux back. I've just never had enough money to put together a campaign, and that's the major shortcoming of Linux: lack of awareness due to lack of significant cash flow. This, together with the DoJ statement that Microsoft can no longer use boot loader restrictions to leverage its monopoly position, will lead to a truly competitive desktop OS market in the near future (I say desktop OS because Linux is already taking over the servers, as evidenced by this commercial).
A solution to the problem with music today
Linux is appealing because of its price and performance, which can be less than with a comparable Unix-based system, Quandt said.
Less performance!! Woohoo!!
Reminds me of the Simpsons when Homer starts his own (internet?) company: "I'll make myself president!! No.... VICE president!!!"
Isn't this article more about Tivoli on linux and less about clustering?
..
Keep in mind it's IBM software on linux that IBM promotes more than linux (partly because AIX is so lame and was never that widely adopted)
This is great. Hopefully it'll help to bring Linux into the corporate world more as a mainstream solution. I find that with about 90% of the solutions I come up with, I'm met with hostility, disdain or disbelief at my suggest of using 'An unproven, unsupported OS'.
Thank god! Mabye my job will be a bit easier now.
To the term clusterf**k.
At least in Redmond...
You are obviously confused.
/you/ work on documentation?
What wine needs to do is implement
all of the win32 functions.
While that may be easy to say,
actually doing it is not.
Often the way a function works is
how MSDN says it works.
What must be done then is painstaking
debugging in order to get the function
working in a way that the applications
that use it expect it work.
Secondly, saying that wine will never run all win32 apps is true, however I have a feeling you are thinking of something different.
VxDs are the problem; theu will be impossible to run in the way that WINE works, you can't translate what a VxD is doing -- it requires direct hardware access.
Thus you would have to throw in a whole emulator to get all VxDs to work. Not fun.
I feel you were thinking more along the lines of what I was mentioning as what the first goal needs to be.
Wine does include registry settings.
I'm not sure what you are thinking.
It does not include every one that it needs,
but there is a reason for that;
usually the functions that need that setting
aren't working.
As another AC mentioned, the kernel already has a mechanism for seamlessly running PE format executables.
However, if you're worried about running applications from other applications, wine already does that.
Since the people that need the kinds of things you are talking about usually click on icons,
I don't see this being a big deal.
Third, Why don't
It doesn't take a programmer. You can bug wine-devel when something doesn't make sense.
In fact, having non programmers work on documentation often is better, because things that don't make sense to them definatly won't make sense to a user.
As for truly useful things:
Alexandre mentioned a few weeks ago something I
would find very useful.
Having a part of wine or a frontend
that would handle per-application settings.
Thus, you could have the annoying installers that
want to run full screen run in a 604x480 wine desktop,
and you could have quick time player run in managed mode.
-- What doesn't kill you hasn't tried hard enough.
Its insteresting how the author chose to avoid the obvious fact that linux competes with windows.
Linux is free open-source software, which means that all code is public and can be adapted by companies and individuals. It competes with other operating systems, such as the popular Unix operating system.
http://access.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Releases/011018.Titan
Top500 org (http://www.top500.org) has the latest rankings out and Platinum is ranked #41 in the world with a 594 rating and Titan is at #34 with a 677 rating. These are not slow systems, but they do require a knowledgeable support staff. Both systems are IBM "out-of-the-box" clusters, running RedHat Linux versions.
I'm just glad to see linux advertised in the mainstream media. Name recognition helps.
More information is available at the main website: http://ncsa.uiuc.edu
The Internet has no garbage collection
You can't apply Linux this to Linux that?
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
> A lot of people seem to confuse what the posters say (which is in quotes btw) and what the Slashdot crew says. Of course, either is just as likely to be spelled incorrectly
Your logic is too deeb for me to fathom.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
What most people fail to understand about this type of cluster (high-performance, rather than high-availability) is that your apps don't *magically* become faster because you have N more nodes to run them on. Cluster applications require coding to an interface such as MPI or PVM to reap the benefits of the hardware. I don't know of any MPI-aware Quake or Apache servers though ;-)
Yeah but Windows came with DOS :)
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
Clustering is such a fascinating area on its own and the article is so shallow that I'm curious why they've published it at all. They could mention the potential benefit of cluster computing as well as examples of some working clusters like Beowulf or Mosix or even the famous fact that there is a cluster among top 500 supercomputers.
Remember that the world's fastest supercomputer runs AIX.
What exactly about AIX do you think is lame?
>You are obviously confused.
/you/ work on documentation?
:P
:P
>What wine needs to do is implement
>all of the win32 functions.
At some point, yes.
>While that may be easy to say,
>actually doing it is not.
>Often the way a function works is not
>how MSDN says it works.
>What must be done then is painstaking
>debugging in order to get the function
>working in a way that the applications
>that use it expect it work.
Ahh, but that's where the 'front-end' work done FIRST becomes helpful. If it's difficult for people to get running, a lot of people are just going to drop the whole thing before they could submit a potentially decent bug-report.
>Secondly, saying that wine will never run all win32 apps is true, however
>I have a feeling you are thinking of something different. VxDs are the
>problem; theu will be impossible to run in the way that WINE works, you
>can't translate what a VxD is doing -- it requires direct hardware
>access. Thus you would have to throw in a whole emulator to get all VxDs
>to work. Not fun.
That's true. And I admit that I know little about Win32 programming, I think there's enough 'garbage' out there to keep basic applications from running in Wine. Hell, Elmo's Workshop doesn't run under XP quite right....
>I feel you were thinking more along the lines of what I was mentioning as
> what the first goal needs to be.
Nope. I have Terminal Server, it's a decent solution (although Citrix is better). It's not THE solution I think needs to be implemented.
Here's my situation.
I have 30 PC's. Most of them run FoxPro 5 based applications, and MS Office, on a Netware Server. I think this is a prime candidate for going
to a LTSP type setup, where I have a beefy server serving thin Linux clients, and all file access is done 'locally'. FoxPro is a bitch for
file access, and the less I can pull over the network, the faster it'll be.
I only need to convert MS Office to Star/K Office, and then run FoxPro in Wine. It's damn close, but some ole errors are killing it. The Foxpro Apps are two commerical, and a slew of custom apps, all centering around SBT.
A conversion to SQL would be exceptional, but the cost isn't beneficial.
Hell, it's $12 grand to UPGRADE to SBT 6.5 for 30 users.
In any case. The benefits would be both cost, and administration. If I can leverage NDS in there, the cost savings for the server would go away, but I would be even happier.
> Wine does include registry settings.
> I'm not sure what you are thinking.
> It does not include every one that it needs,
> but there is a reason for that;
> usually the functions that need that setting
> aren't working.
Yes, but having to import them manually should not be necessary. I found the 'documentation' to do that in the wine-devel archive.
> As another AC mentioned, the kernel already has a mechanism for
> seamlessly running PE format executables.
That's definately informative and I was not aware of that. Problem solved. Now how do we let others like me know that?
> However, if you're worried about running applications from other
> applications, wine already does that.
> Since the people that need the kinds of things you are talking about
> usually click on icons, I don't see this being a big deal.
Nope, I don't have an issue with functionality AFTER installation. Except for the obvious apps not running yet, but it's not a final product yet.
>Third, Why don't
Well, I'm a manager. I manage.
>It doesn't take a programmer. You can bug wine-devel when something
>doesn't make sense.
As much as I would like to. To be frank, I don't want to. I don't have that kind of time available.
At this point in my life, I'd rather take a day or two off, and reshingle the garage (it's a bitch lifting those things up there), than take EXTRA time out of my day to make more money on the side consulting. Yes, I enjoy helping people out. I have a bunch of stuff at www.havokmon.com/stuff for people to use, and I help out on mailing lists, but those aren't time-consuming like this project would take. I'm more of a quick-fix type of person, not spending a lot of time on one particular thing, of course, I should never have to revisit that issue either.
Plus, my documentation sucks, and I have a bad attitude about it, because I know people don't read it.
>In fact, having non programmers work on documentation often is better,
>because things that don't make sense to them definatly won't make sense to a
>user.
Ok. If I did it, this is what I would do.
Take a bare system.
Install Wine as fake_windows.
Write down what I did.
Nicen up the registry import documentation.
Create a win32 app (or find one?) to capture complete application installation for 'replay' into Wine registry, and appropriate file locations.
Now, the whole point of my original post, is the above shouldn't be needed. Wine should have the registry imported when it's installed
with fake_windows (ala codeweavers), and Installation apps should be the first
programs to run. I think it's wrong that I can't install the VFP5.0 runtime yet through Wine.
If you build it they will come. It's really true, but it 'they' can't get in, they're going to go away. And I think Wine needs to have 'more
access', before it has more applications. Why have a big park full of rides, if a large part of the community can't get in. The Linux community
is becoming more and more 'newbieish'. I see people all the time, just wanting to "Try Linux." They have no clue how to do any of that. It
took me hours to find the registry import stuff that's right there in the wine checkout (Why wasn't it mentioned in the README, or am I a twit, and just missed it?). For some reason, I just expected the installer to install the runtime.
>As for truly useful things:
>Alexandre mentioned a few weeks ago something I
>would find very useful.
>Having a part of wine or a frontend
>that would handle per-application settings.
>Thus, you could have the annoying installers that
>want to run full screen run in a 604x480 wine desktop,
>and you could have quick time player run in managed mode.
This sounds nifty, but I think it's out of order. Get the installers to RUN first, then worry about how to manage the screen real-estate.
Don't work on what's cool, it's the non-cool stuff that will get the train moving.
>-- What doesn't kill you hasn't tried hard enough.
Or you made her sign a pre-nup...
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Really? I was?!
woof.
Every two weeks (max) I have to explain to some "Administrator" how to make Microsoft Clustering work with various software. I haven't ever in my life had to explain it to someone working in UNIX or Linux. Any ideas why?
... I'd like to see them run an ad featuring French-speaking nuns.
I agree as long as you talking about Linux. Nonehteless, apparently, this article was designed to project it on truly exciting field of cluster computing, where it, IMHO, fails.
As for Linux it's simply a tool of choice being among a small number of operating systems able to facilitate such an extensive research that clustering (especially the branch of global computing) necessitates.
Hey everyone, check out this Redbook, published by IBM. I've loved their Redbooks for years, and now that I work for IBM e-business, I've been asked to study this guide before I start deploying HPC clusters.
Intelligent Life on Earth
The announcement may make it 'official', but IBM has been selling turn-key style clusters for over a year now.
How do I know, and why do I care? 'Cause I work for IBM, and design and build Linux clusters for a living.
We rack purpose-built 1U's (x330's) built for easy large-scale mangement (built-in daisy-chain KVM capabilities, integrated service processor network, cool blinky lights, etc, etc), have internally developed mangement software and system imaging solutions, and ship them to customers at a point where all they need to do is plug them in and log on.
The only real issue is almost no one has a 'standard' cluster application. Almost every one uses a different IPC mechanism, and usually an app is only validated against one very specific software image. So to get the most out of a cluster, customers still need to spend time tweaking.
Maybe someday soon, we'll all be able to 'apt-get install damned_big_cluster', but until then... <shameless>just call IBM.</shameless>
--Matthew
slashdot at sigalrm dot com
The Holy Grail of CLustering is being able to migrate an open socket from one machine to another without disrupting it. I have a trivial solution but there is not enough room in this Windows message box.
Compare this with Microsoft's advertising, which is sometimes grossly misleading, occasionally even other-worldly. I feel good about IBM being on our side. Let's hope lots of Slashdot'ers forward this to their top IT management.
If they keep promoting these servers as in this commercial then at least we'll get a couple of good laughs out of it :)
karma capped
that a utility to check your cluster's file system is called:
Clusters.fsck?
If it is not on fire, it is a software problem.
It's definately refreshing to see Linux getting some mainstream advertising, and it surely raises some hopes as to the future of Linux distribution. Unfortuately, whether or not this is significant in any way and whether or not it is representative of any sort of development can only be seen through time. Breaking open the OS market is something that Linux isn't going to do anytime soon. Possibly in some years, we might see this happen, but I'm afraid it's the sort of thing that, barring any absolutely huge events which completely revolutionize the OS market, will take a very long time and I remain unconvinced as to how important this actually is.
What's in a Sig?
Clusters are clusters, but not all clusters are equal.
You have high speed compute clusters like Beowulf.
Then there's the first type of High Availability clusters -- the hot standby/failover configuration, where services and storage on one system are reassigned and restarted by another if the first goes away. Most Unix and Linux implementations haven't got beyond this yet.
Then there's the more grown up version of High Availability clusters, where all the clustered systems have concurrent access to the same storage, cluster wide lock management, and can run multiple cooperating instances of the same application on all systems. Like Oracle Parallel Server. VMS pioneered this ; Tru64 Unix has it now, and Linux is working towards it with GFS (the Global FileSystem).
GFS has got to be one of the most exciting current Linux developments in my book. I've had a taste of this kind of clustering on Tru64 Unix, and believe me, once you've experienced it you don't want to go back.
It looks like Bill's now desperate to hook students into paying for MS-Passport.
As an example, the Nov. 13 issue of PC Magazine points out that even Microsoft's online privacy statement Generator requires hooking users first to MS-Passport. In contrast, IBM's generator does not.
So, it is good to see IBM using positive examples. If enough new people give up on pathways that lead to guaranteed vendor lock-in, then we'll see even more Open Source and Free Software and more useful applications.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Well the reason that company's want a point and click based OS is because they can hire cheaper workers and there is less chance of major problems since most people use point and click OS's at home.
A : "what is Linux?"
B : "it makes you save money"
Now it says:
A : "what is a server?"
B : "it makes you save money"
Can anybody confirm/deny that ?
(BTW this sort of 'ads fixing' seems to be a standard practice: I've seen it happen lots of time. They sort of analyse people reaction and 'fine tune' the ad accordingly)
Ciao
----
FB
have you considered using a mosix cluster
brian is at entropy dot net