Linuxfest Northwest 2004 Wrap-up

prostoalex writes "Linuxfest Northwest 2004 took place in Bellingham, WA this past Saturday, as announced on Slashdot before. Check out the ever-expanding photo album and what people are saying in their blogs. I also have an extensive and highly subjective write-up on my site, but I can only vouch for the events I've been to myself. Compare that to Linuxfest 2000 coverage to see how things have changed."

Comments

Entertaining Open-Source Documentation?

[osewa77]

Wouldn't it be nice if the full text of the lectures at such meetings were available to reporters and technical writers? A lot of authoritative Open-Source knowledge is presented at events like this and never becomes available to Joe public... at least with transcripts available we can get writers to _re-organize_ the information later on.
just a nigerian personal web publisher

Pacific Northwest National Labs HPC Linux Cluster

[Maxwell309]

I thought LFNW was awesome. I especially enjoyed the Pacific Northwest National Labs High Performance Linux Cluster talk given by Timothy A Witteveen of PNL. It is one hell of a machine. It is one hell of a machine. 9.4 teraflops and a 53 terrabyte SAN running NWLinux. It placed 5th on the last Top 500 List.

That 53 terrabyte SAN is one contiguous filesystem using lustre. The use of QSNet2/Elan4 interconnects make the use of terbyte data sets with lots of internode communication more efficient than past machines. These interconnects provide a peak bandwidth of 340 MB/sec in each direction. But even more impresive than the bandwidth is the latency, between 2 us and 5 us. Compare that with ethernet latency measured in tens or even hundreds of ms.

During the presentation Tim went over two examples of simulations performed on their cluster that could not be accomplished on other machines. These examples were outside of my domain of knowledge, but one involved simulating the behavior of water molecules and the other was an extremely detailed protein folding simulation.

One last bit that was interesting was their methodology for updating the machines. They have over a thousand and took some time to determine an efficient means to keep the machines up to date. It was determined that reimaging the maches was faster than applying patches. They utilize a multicast approach in which allows them, theoretically, to reimage all of the machines in 28 minutes. They do not always reach this theoretical maximum, but they reimage a thousand machines PDQ.

The meet & greet in the commons was fun. Pogo Linux had a free drawing for a loaded AMD64 system. There was plenty of swag to be had from all sorts of folks. It was cool to stop and chat with one of the Helix developers. All in all there was a really good group of folks gathered.

I know Slashdot is full of trolls, but I must say I am a little suprised at how many crappy comments LFNW is getting. All I have to say to those filled with negativity is screw you. Here in the Pacific Northwest we have some cool stuff going on. Whether it is the 3 new lugs in Seattle, OSDL in Portland, the Linux Cluster at PNL, SeattleWireless, PersonalTelco or LFNW there are exciting things happening up here. I think a couple people on this site need to take their heads out of their arses and take a look around. Folks up here are using linux, and getting stuff done.