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Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of Penguin Computers
Pii writes "News.com is running a story about Penguin Computing acquiring Scyld Computing, a company founded by Donald Becker, of linux ethernet driver and Beowulf cluster fame. Becker will stay on as Penguin's Chief Technology Officer, and the companies claim they don't expect any layoffs as a result of the merger."
The topic alone makes the next 100 posts redundant..
Prehaps now they'll have enough time to get the DEC Tulip driver working 100%
Just curious (in a serious way), is anybody actually using a beowolf cluster for anything important? Anything that couldn't be done with a super-powerful single machine?
--D
I posted newbieshly to a Debian NG and amidst the flames and RTFM's, Donald Becker actually took the time to provide me with the solution.
This experience encouraged me to continue learning Linux networking, and the rest is (obscure) history.... :-)
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
A Beowulf cluster of resurgent troll jokes.
A Beowulf Cluster of Beowulf Clustering Companies ... shenanigans.
Here's one at my workplace...
What takes hours on this system could take weeks on a "super-powerful single machine".
BlackNova Traders
Imagine a Penguin cluster of a Beowulf Penguin cluster of clusters of Penguins and Beowulfs surrounded by clusters of Beowins and Pengowulfs which are then clustered together into a nice, neat, little cluster.
Betcha can't imagine that. So there!
How do you rate the article as troll?
Bugs are just features that have been fixed.
Have you ever heard clusters mentioned in literature prior to 1960? No? That's because liberal scientists invented the concept of Beowulf Clusters to push their hippie Communist principles through false benchmark numbers telling us the pervasive lie that sharing resources evenly is the most efficient method. Don't buy it.
the two companies don't expect to lay off any staff, a representative said
... The key word here is "expect". My former company's management didn't expect layoffs either, but funnily enough they did 6 rounds before sinking completely.
Right, so they'll have 2 PR divisions, 2 marketing divisions,
This said, Donald Becker is cool, Penguin Computing is cool (I toyed with an alpha box from them for a while and I was very inpressed), so I reckon the result should be uber-cool.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
those guys are great, and congrats to them. I have fond memories of walking down to their office on Mission St, and carrying one of their new 2U boxes down to where I worked. When we opened the box, not only did we find a machine that is still running right now (over 2 years) but a couple of cool tshirts.
Everyone knows that you can't keep a Beowulf cluster of penguins up for too long; the nodes will all go down as soon as a plane flies over them and trash your uptime.
Whoops.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
We have 2 that we use for simulations in the Physics department. Well, i say 2...the 2nd one hasn't actually been assembled yet.
The reason we use the beowulfs is because the problems are such that they're easy to break up into chunks. Consider the "system" (in our case) to be a cube with stuff inside that we want to process. We can break the cube up into smaller cubes and process those chunks, and then reassemble (must like is done with folding@home, seti@home, and the like).
The difference? Well, instead of a program taking a day to run, it will take a few hours. Instead of taking a week, it may take a day.
Sometimes a problem doesn't require a Beowulf. If you require several simulations, and the total CPU time amounts to 1 month...then you'd do just as well running the simulations on nodes and just waiting a month. If you REALLY want to know what's happening with a certain set of conditions, it's often times very useful to use the cluster to find out in a matter of hours.
Mike.
Mmmm......sacrelicious.
Ahh... cheap shit Tulip cards and RealTek 8139s... now those are the kinds of quality hardware you can depend on! And you wonder why you have networking problems.
Becker has spent a LOT of his time adding Linux support for poorly documented, mis-configured, total crap hardware - and you cheap assholes complain. You should read the kernel newsgroup archives - some developers suggested a few years back that they dump RTL81XX entirely because the firmware sucked so bad. You whiners should be thanking Scyld for their work.
Or maybe buy a decent NIC instead.
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
...the 2 workers at each company were relieved to here today that their jobs were no in jeopardy.
However, they are very concerned about the announced 10% in staff reduction.
well this is great news. i work for a visual fx company and we pretty much use Penguin gear for our render farms and IT infrastructure. These guys have great gear and great prices...so this sounds great.
I thought Scyld was based in Anapolis Md. will they be moving out to Cali?
God is real, unless declared integer.
I've got 3
All made entirely out of hot grits
All installed by Natalie Portman, who I stripped and petrified afterwards.
Oh ya, they're all in here, too.