LinuxBIOS, BProc-Based Supercomputer For LANL

An anonymous reader writes "LANL will be receiving a 1024 node (2048 processor) LinuxBIOS/BProc based supercomputer late this year. The story is at this location. This system is unique in Linux cluster terms due to no disks on compute nodes, using LinuxBIOS and Beoboot to accomplish booting, and BProc for job startup and management. It is officially known as the Science Appliance, but is affectionately known as Pink to the team that is building much of it."

Comments

betatest: I've uses Bproc and Linux Bios

[goombah99]

I've been a beta tester on the prototype for this system. It works great. I've seen diskless systems before they all were NFS nighmares, could not scale and had horrible tendencies to cause rippling crashes as one computer after the next timed out on some critical disk based kernel operation it could not complete across a wedged network.

This one, brpoc, is different it is completely stable. You never get NFS wedges. Jobs launch in flash. Plus if you do reboot the whole thing is back up in seconds (literally).

Bproc is an incredibly light weight job submission system. It is so light weight and fast that it changes how you think about sumbitting jobs. Rather than designing long duration jobs and tossing them on queue, you can just run tiny short jobs if you want with no loss to overhead. It makes you re-think the whole idea of batch processing.

when the jobs run they appear in the process list of the master node. That is if you run "top" or "ps" the jobs are listed right there. In fact from the users point of view the whole system looks like just one big computer.