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LinuxBIOS, BProc-Based Supercomputer For LANL

Posted by timothy on from the yeah-but-what-about-the-neon-lights dept.

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."

8 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. Not a Beowulf cluster by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    But if you'd replace the expensive high-performance interconnect with a cheap ethernet, then it would be a Beowulf cluster.

  2. LinuxBIOS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I wonder why LinuxBIOS hasn't taken off. I've debated ordering one of their "kits." It seems to me the 3 second boot time of LinuxBIOS should be a selling point for some obscure Linux vendor, but no one really offers it yet.

    I really imagine a machine with an 8MB EEPROM/ROM that can be updated as needed, but provides a boot environment and login screen - while spinning the disks in the background. This would make an excellent product.

    Why hasn't anyone done this yet?

    Curious

  3. Why not use embedded tech? by Chirs · · Score: 4, Insightful


    This sounds like some kind of dual-processor rackmount type solution. Why not go all the way and use something like compactPCI? You can fit 21 cPCI blades into 8U of rackspace.

    A standard blade could have up to a couple gigs of ram, a powerpc or p3/p4 cpu, 100BT or 1000BT ethernet, etc, etc.

    You boot the things using bootp/tftpboot and then run linux off a ramdisk.

    We're using cPCI at work to run VoIP softwitches. Currently we're at over a million calls an hour on a wimpy 450MHz processor.

  4. Re:Wow... by binaryDigit · · Score: 5, Funny

    Think so? Wouldn't a system with disks be more suitable for that

    Nah, just one honkin RAMDisk. Could serve up mucho porn/warez, when the feds come knockin, just pull the plug, presto, no evidence :)

  5. Re:Uses by marm · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Does anybody know other applications that supercomputers are being used for. I know some do weather predictions.

    Ok, non-military uses, off the top of my head:

    • mathematical research - simply complicated maths on big numbers
    • fluid dynamics modelling - traffic flows, or aerodynamics, or hydrodynamics - this is also tied in quite closely with weather/climate prediction
    • statistical modelling - wouldn't you like to know if the stock market is going to go up or down tomorrow, before it happens?
    • computational chemistry/biochemistry - protein folding is just the tip of the iceberg - imagine being able to design a molecule and then simulate the effect it will have on the human body, without that substance ever having been actually synthesized or going near a human... this is the future of drug development
    • quantum mechanical simulation - related to computational chemistry, imagine taking all those complicated quantum mechanics equations to their logical conclusions, predicting as-yet undiscovered subatomic particles and their behaviour, or to design better magnetic containment fields so that practical fusion energy generation is possible
    • good old-fashioned databases and signal processing - when you have hundreds of terabytes of data that you wish to mine for interesting patterns, speed matters

    I'm sure there are plenty more applications for supercomputer power - any kind of complicated or chaotic system is a good candidate for modelling, especially when there's more than one unknown variable (multivariate analysis is complicated, to say the least).

  6. betatest: I've uses Bproc and Linux Bios by goombah99 · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.

    --
    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
  7. Don't do it! by FyRE666 · · Score: 4, Funny

    I will personally track down and slaughter the first person to mention a popular clustering architecture, and how one might imagine it...

    --
    Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
  8. Cluster details by MalleusEBHC · · Score: 4, Funny

    Cluster Overview:
    * 2050 Intel 2.4GHz Xeon processors

    Now when people complain about the United States government being responsible for global warming they will have some good hard facts to use.