Slashdot Mirror
MandrakeClustering Shows Off At ISC2003
joestar writes "Just released today at ISC2003, Germany, is "MandrakeClustering", a high-performance computing Linux distribution/solution, which sounds interesting, at least in the PR: Pentium support with optimizations made with the Intel compiler, 64-bit Opteron support (with in this case, up to 16 GB of RAM for each cluster's node!), parallelized URPMI (Mandrake's apt-get) and other dedicated tools. This product is based on a one-year research project "CLIC" involving MandrakeSoft and partners. A good snapshot of the product running a 3D real-time demo is available here. The interesting point now: MandrakeClustering's goal is to provide a system which is easy to deploy, easy to administer and use. Well... Mum would certainly love to play Quake with this toy."
It's easier to manage an openmosix cluster than this mandrake cluster. Plus you can run diskless nodes using ClusterKnoppix!.
Consistent? /bin/sh is /bin/sh wether in NetBSD, OS X or GNU.
I'd consider xmms second only to win amp, dunno what your problem is...
easy OS install? How often do you have to install your os?
clustering research that improves multiplayer gaming well into the next decade? In my mind, that's priceless...
Uh... thats entirely a 'personal preference' sort of thing.
Heres some stereotypical information about a few distros, though:
RedHat: Corporate Environment
Mandrake: Easy install, easy to use, but has some hard to resolve dependency issues
SuSE: If you are german
Debian: Do it yourselfer
Gentoo: huge 'coolness' factor, a get-it-while-its-still-hot sort of thing.
Slackware: The traditional disto for hard-core geeks
The $2,960 is to get support with it.
Where I work (www.ornl.gov) we run weather models, nuclear stuff (explosions, fallout tracking, power plants, nuclear medical materials simulations), genome projects, particle flow analisys, a bunch of stuff (though unfortunatly for Mr. Dyslexic here no speel checker for slashdot :) ). Oil companies process seismic data to try and map what's underground, medical companies help develope medicines and gene therapy.
Some of the projects (human genome most currently) may run for weeks over 10-20 terabytes of data. The algorithms used are pretty mundane - you just need to do them A LOT. Some of the particle flow stuff may model individual molecules in a furnace for example (not rendering the frames, but modelling the interactions and how to create a more effecient jet engine).
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
CFD is one of the major uses of clusters
Huh ? How got this modded as insightful ? Anyways, if you read the announcement, this is for high performance computing. It is a turn-key solution to easily set up, maintain and monitor a parallel cluster. Parallel clusters are essentially arrangements of computers that allow to process data at each computer at the same time ("in parallel"), and then collect the results and combine them, thus making possible to achieve supercomputing power out of inexpensive hardware.
The announcement very clearly states which is the market niche they target (i.e. research labs and the like):
By the way. It is so nice to see Mandrake aiming at corporate/government customers, this is going to be very healthy for the company. I would expect and encourage more of this ...
I am the main programmer of the 3d demo shown on the screenshots. This demo combines a distributed interactive fluid simulation with graphical intensive rendering using pixel shaders. It uses Net Juggler to manage the distribution on the cluster. You canse some picture and a video of the fluid simulation in our gallery . The shader for the rabbit's fur is explained on this page of my website (please be gentle with the server...).
There are basically these two kinds of clusters, one for the traditional high performance computing stuff to replace expensive supercomputers, the other one is for high availability, e.g. for preventing the Slashdot effect.