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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."
But what are people doing with these things in the wild? Is everyone running rendering farms?
Do file/mail servers really need this kind of horsepower (assuming you aren't Google or Yahoo, of course)?
I have been pwned because my
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these ! I'd kick your ass at quake with one !
Is it as fast as the new Macs?
Caffeine Good
It's easier to manage an openmosix cluster than this mandrake cluster. Plus you can run diskless nodes using ClusterKnoppix!.
If so, then I think it's a pretty good investment. :)
:)
So much for the "bailing out a failing business, let the market sort it out" mindset. If Mandrake hadn't appealed to the public, they would not have had the $ to come up with this.
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...
Wait until you read it in the NY Times
It's not like there's anything free out there that does this.
"Imagine a Mandrake cluster of ..."
:-(
That just doesn't have the same ring to it
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
Wow, first /. posting of something Mandrake related in some time. Is it just me, or have a lot of announcements not even mentioned Mandrake recently?
Even though I don't use Mandrake I do wish them the best, especially with a number of Linux distro's competing for the desktop. Hopefully they will make some money from this venture.
StarTux
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
Unless I read the article wrong, these clusters will not be operating on the same level as Windows and OSX. This is designed for research and heavy-duty number crunching, something that XP and OSX aren't. I agree, talented programmers are spending too much time on worthless projects, but this isn't one of them.
One word:
iTunes.
(I think he was talking about video/streaming media players more than MP3 players, and to be fair, there are a number of codecs that Linux doesn't fully support.)
The $2,960 is to get support with it.
An OS that surrenders under pressure?
because we all know that render times kick ass when processors have a 12mb/s wifi link between them. What were multi-processor manufacturers thinking building the processors into one unit when beowulfing is available!
(Beowulf clusters have long-term power but slow reaction times. Firewire networking (maybe scsi?) would help with this, but the node->node bandwidth is still an issue.)
Why would Mandrake use Intel's compiler for the Opteron?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
It looks like I'm the Apple troll today, so I have to point out that there is a specially designed Xserve U1 rackmount for clustering apps. I think that part of this has to do with the fact that Apple is still used disproportionately often in academia, and part of it has to do with the Apple-Pixar connection. But it turns out that OS X (the server edition, anyway) is a clustering OS. See here for more details.
Umm, well, XMMS can't get virused like Winamp can, for one thing..
Should be in next week. I'll have my Mom drive it, too. Wait for the slashdot article, "Mom Meets Linux (Super Computer Ed)"
/bin/sh is /bin/sh wether in NetBSD, OS X or GNU.
/bin/sh is vanilla bourne shell under NetBSD and OSX, but under GNU and Linux it's all too often a symlink to bash. Although bash has very good bourne compatibility, and squeaks past the POSIX shell requirements, it's managed to cause numerous headaches for me when I specify /bin/sh only to get /bin/bash instead. /bin/sh should always be a plain boring bourne shell, and not a link to bash, ksh or another "big" shell. /bin/sh is not going to be used by the enduser, it's going to be used by scripts.
Not really.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The cluster management software may be useful for things like offices, class rooms, etc, where one needs to maintain a bunch of identical systems.
you know enough to either {rm /bin/sh && ln -s `which ash` /bin/sh} or write conditional statements in your scripts that isn't an option...
I've been using Mandrake for a while, and I would hate to see this company go - they have many great tools, and they put every single line of code they wrote under the gpl (unlike YAST for instance, even though I love SuSe too). They probably need as much PR as they can get, and this was a good idea.
Its time for some features, like their excellent urpm* tools to get more attention (I wonder why it received such scare coverage, for it is the only package management tool that is on par with apt-get among rpm-based distributions - maybe with the exception of apt-rpm). Another great tool, excellent in large deployments is draksync.
Check out these sites:
urpmi mini-howto and easy-urpmi
Firewire can do 1Gbps?
It ain't a cluster until it has a clustered file system. Until it has that it is nothing more than another high availability solution.
Got Code?
This joke is not funny anymore. Cease and desist making stupid Beowulf cluster jokes.
Have a nice day.
Spend $20k on Plasma Displays ...
Spend $40k on Cluster Hardware
Leave the cords of the subwoofers and amplifier exposed
Priceless....
Monster Linux Garage Mantra: If you are going to build something cool, it should look cool too.
Sample AMD Case-mod
It's a shame there isn't a "-1: Religious War Initiation" mod.
"God, root, what is difference?" - Pitr, userfriendly
Any word on G5 Xserves?
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Well with windows i find that a periodic reinstall of the OS (the older the OS the more often) removes weird problems that cropup from use of the system. Ah windows....got love it...NOT!...they make me use it just to punish me :(
. I love the sound of burning women and screaming rubber....
That's 3 separate instances of windowmaker, right? With Xinerama, wouldn't the icons only be on 1 desktop? Dunno, never used it before.
The heat from below can burn your eyes out
It looks like I'm the Apple troll today, so I have to point out that there is a specially designed Xserve U1 rackmount for clustering apps. Actually, Ill be the troll, all Xserves are cluster ready. It just takes more than one, and it is cool! Just Frickin expensive, baby!
. I love the sound of burning women and screaming rubber....
Clusters, Mandrake, Opteron, 16GB. Add in an Xbox and Natalie Portman and you've got yourself a Slashdotter's wet dream. Well, I guess Natalie accomplishes that on her own, but I'm pretty sure if I had the rest of that stuff it would impress Natalie enough for her to date me. At least I hope so, or I've wasted a LOT of money over the years.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
Maybe they should've just gotten an ATI 9800 Pro to do the rendering instead of all those loud and expensive boxen ::)
-- taking over the world, we are.
Heck, I'm not an Apple fan (in fact I tend to really dislike the UI in the mac os) but yellow dog linux has had some good clustering solutions for smaller clusters, both for high availibility and computation. They had some pretty nifty software (though last time I saw it it had some severe scalability problems with thier UI - but then again they were not selling multi thousand node clusters and it has been a couple of years since I last checked that closely).
See http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
Let's hope that their webserver is a MandrakeCluster too what with the good ol'-fashioned Slashdotting it's getting now.
It's going to cost a lot more $$$ to get a cluster of Apples going vs. a cluster of Intel/AMDs
Might not be the case if you're a school...
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
What, aside from decoding some jpegs, is fp used for these days? It's faster to do the calculations as integers and then divide into a floating point value when completed.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
But slightly related. :-)
This clustering thing gave me the idea -- pardon me if not original:
Mandrake could sell CPU time! Like those SETI, cancer drug molecule manipulation, code breaking/ prime number finding etc.
We, Mandrake users, could (on a voluntary basis) donate hours of unused computer time to give them what to sell.
Is there a market for this?
Is this possible/viable?
At least, they could use such processing for their distro making related tasks.
Additionally:
They could install automatically (again, on a voluntary basis) bit-torrent servers, so as to reduce their bandwidth bills.
Of course, the usage of such CPU time/peer-2-peer serving would be subject to an agreement. Think here about a list with checkboxes to let the user choose which kinds of content would her machine serve.
This time, I gave my 2 cents.
/bin/sh should be the Bourne Shell, PERIOD. Ever since the first idiot tried to link /bin/sh to /bin/other-shell, it has caused nothing but trouble. It may not be the greatest, but the Borne shell has been one of the most immutable parts of Unix, for most of its history.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Imagine a Mandrake cluster of those.... ;)
I mean... the opterons
I for one, welcome our new hot grits... PROFIT!
Unless I read the article wrong, these clusters will not be operating on the same level as Windows and OSX. This is designed for research and heavy-duty number crunching, something that XP and OSX aren't
:)
:)
WindowsXP, um, maybe as the 64bit version also only does 16GB of RAM.
However, Windows 2003 Server(check the features for yourself, like the ability to use 512GB of RAM), then I would say no, it isn't in the same class as Windows, not close yet.
Of course, media formats are completely outside the of Linux's scope, but have you tried MPlayer? It's far from perfect, but it's difficult to find a commonly used format or codec it can't understand.
Did your problems result from differences between traditional Bourne shell and POSIX? Bash tries to conform to POSIX more than the traditional sh. Specifically, when invoked as "sh" it enters POSIX mode, so /bin/bash may actually be closer to traditional than /bin/sh. I don't have any experience with traditional Bourne shell, so I really don't know what the issues might be.
Some organizations management might not allow them to set up PXE.
So you think someone is going to setup a high performance cluster on the same network segment as the rest of the corporate network?
Spend a fortune on high performance compute nodes, and not buy a seperate switch?
Until the Linux Community learns this very important lesson...
You are the Linux community.
Stop bitching and start coding.
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...).
Here it comes... I'm going to vent. How is that ./ readers (clearly amongst the most well-educated of the 'net surfing masses) always fall for the bigger == better claim? First of all, Quake, or any computer game that I can think of, does not have multi-node support. You have to rewrite the code to support the PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) message passing library, for example.
And it's not just with clusters we seem to have this problem. Let's look at Apple computers and the G5. A 64-bit machine will simply allow you to add/subtract/multiply/etc really big integers faster. How often do think you use numbers that large? Encrypting or decrypting emails is the only thing that comes to mind for even an "above average" user. Unless you run software that supports multiple processors such as web and database servers or want to watch a DVD while you play Quake, a multiprocessor machine is not for you. The relative performance increases are negligible. It's simply a marketing ploy that allows Apple to make a high profit on the low volume of units they ship. They throw an additional $300 uP in their computers and charge an extra $1000!
But in Apple's defense, their displays rock. Any luck getting one of those running on a PC? I'm done ranting. Have a nice day.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of MandrakeClusters!
As I said earlier, bash has very good bourne compatibility. Also the differences between traditional bourne and POSIX sh are minimal.
/bin/sh still recognizes bash extensions. This can make life very difficult in a heterogenous environment. A shell script that says #!/bin/sh should always behave as a bourne shell script, and never as a bash script.
/bin/sh. But you're always looking for speed and resources in an embedded environment, so I tried saving about 300k by using a minimal bourne shell (ash). I expected some porting problems, but I would never have guessed that EVERY script had a problem.
The problem is that bash running as
My day job is working on a complex embedded system. My progenitors wrote a whole bunch of bash scripts marked as #!/bin/sh. Everything worked fine as long as bash was linked to
Here's one example. HOSTNAME. This is a bash extension. It's a damned useful extension, but an extension nonetheless. And bash still recognizes it in POSIX mode. Something like this is way too easy to overlook when you're trying to write a compatible script. All bash scripts should be marked as bash scripts.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
FYAH
Yes, I can certainly see how that would be a problem. Bash needs the equivalent of -Wall and -Werror.
Now we know what type of performance we can get when we get all of these penguins to swim in the same direction all day.
Ross Youngblood
My, you is a persistent AC, ain't ye?