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Linux Distro turns PCs into Night-time Clusters
renai42 writes "An Australian security firm is about
to launch a clustered Linux distribution based on openMosix that aims to
utilise the unused nightly processing power of corporate desktops.
Dubbed CHAOS, the distro is able to remotely boot a computer and run
it on Linux without affecting the local hard disk. CHAOS is designed
to provide dumb node power to a cluster run by existing full-featured
clustering distributions such as Quantian and ClusterKnoppix."
I don't know whether it's just me and my uninformed nature, but it occurs to me that switching off these computers would be saving a hell of a lot of money. Rather than using them for something else - which I notice TFA is not clear on, something about a demonstration - why not just power down?
From the Pure Hacking website - Internal on-site penetration testing gives the business the assurance it needs to conduct safely on the internet and with business partners.
It would make a lot more sense if this was only intended for use in demonstrations and testing though, as I can imagine very few companies would feel a need to use this sort of distro on a nightly basis, but for one off activities it may be useful.
Imagine a beo... oh, wait.
Quoth the server, "404."
If it needs to have a Knoppix image installed every night, does that mean I need to leave the Knoppix CD in the drive before I head home? Sounds like the plan would work except for all the lazy people in the office leaving their Mark Knopfler CDs in the drive instead of Linux.
CHAOS is designed to provide dumb node power to a cluster
Hell, my nodes are occupied by the dumb during the day, too. Have we found an actual productive use for lusers?
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Hope it will be secure enough.
If somebody runs a patched on version on his local machine it can take over the whole cluster.
Imagine a hackneyed cliché of these!
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
Now I hope that SETI and those other protein folding projects can really get a boost. Who knows? A company which is carrying out its own research may actually be helping its competitor giving it the processing power in the nighttime! And what about i/p stuff, if someone makes a new finding will it be credited to the computer or to the whole cluster ? I think these have to be sorted out first. These issues have not come up partly because SETI and others have not found out anything significant yet. But who knows. that day might just be tomorrow!
Are they serious? They expect corporation to agree to allow their PCs to be booted remotely and used for a task outside their control, and which doesn't make them any money.
I honestly can't see anyone willingly agreeing to install it.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
I remember hearing about how in the future, we would be able to plug in to the internet and not only access information but also spare processing power. It would be really handy; most of the time you are only using a fraction of the power of your computer (for example, my usage is hovering at around 8%, and I have a movie playing as well as several other applications running), but when you need more processing power, you could get it on demand. Of course, the lag would make it too slow for video games and such, but for some computationally-intensive stuff (video editing, ray-tracing, etc.) it would be perfect.
Real_men_don't_need_spacebars.
Corporate Linux Fundamentalist 1: There's this new product that uses all our PC's overnight to harness their power for the greater good. It runs on Linux. It would be a good way for us to become more Linux friendly in the workplace.
.Grid or something else Microsoftie, well at least it wasn't called KAy05
IT Director: Um, sure, OK, what's it called?
Corporate Linux Fundamentalist: Um, Chaos?
Could they not of thought of a better name, how about
... to make Australia the largest Beowulf cluster in the world?
"We were just looking for a groovy name that would stick out in a world of groovy names,"
Actually their first choice was "Mandriva" but somebody had recently taken that "groovy" name... Aahhh, just missed!
~Aha~
We call the solution PXE booting. Never trust users to do anything.
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
Hello For information this kind of stuff already exists, from long time. I invite you to visit this webpage : http://www.lri.fr/~fedak/XtremWeb/introduction.php 3
Regards
Having bought a Dell computer at Wal-Mart, I know enough about clustering to XML my way to the top with the big boys. I have contacted www.top500.org to let them know the correct order of supercomputers listing.
How long before this starts to take over peoples' computers and do evil stuff, such as spamming and such?
Can this be a disguise for a new zombie technology?
In Soviet Russia Clichés Cluster You!!!
(I love any attempt at a Soviet Russia meme based joke... I just picture the smiling face of Yakov in my head.)
Get your Unix fortune now!
What is CHAOS - the supercomupter for your wallet?
The most significant change to the project, as far as the open source community will be conerned, is the quality of the distribution
As they are concerned about quality, any chance they could put all that unused computing power towards a Goddamned spell-checker?
Indy Media Watch-Proctologist of the Internet
In Australian Russia, security firm runs computer on Linux!
An innovation from DownUnder! Are there any other innovations from the Aussies to speak of? I must admit I never took them that serious before. This changes my mind for sure.
Here is a suggestion that would allow computers that are not in use to be "co-opted" for use in the cluster.
Identify the PC's that COULD theoretically be used, and collect their MAC addresses. Also, configure them to try netboot first, then fall back to booting from the hard drive.
When you want to perform computations, send a WakeOnLAN packet targeted to each of these computers. Wait for netboot solicitations, then, if you have recently sent a WOL packet to that computer, respond with an appropriate netboot directive, booting the PC into a cluster node configuration, with all details loaded from the cluster director.
Otherwise, allow the netboot solicitation to time out, and the computer will boot into its normal configuration.
Not sure how OpenMosix handles nodes that simply vanish, but users could simply reboot the PC when they arrive in the morning, if the computation is still ongoing. Otherwise, the cluster director could remote shutdown/reboot each node prior to the user arriving at work.
Unused PC's would not consume power, cluster node PC's could be instructed to immediately drop the monitor into Power-save mode, etc.
The cluster director could decide how many nodes to start, or the location of the nodes, to optimise the comms between it and the servers.
An idea with potential, I think!
This CHAOS distribution sounds neat, but with all those machines booting up different OSes at different times it seems a bit complex, possibly almost too complex to CONTROL. (Ah, the old boot Linux on machines over the network but only in the middle of the night trick.)
I don't know what you clicked on this time Dad, but this thing's not even running Windows now!
"An Australian security firm is about to launch a clustered Linux distribution based on openMosix..."
You're kidding me, right? CHAOS has been out for some 2 years (at least). Unless I'm misunderstanding, or another Australian organization is doing this...:
CHAOS Distro
But what do I know.
Digital Sailor
Does anybody have some example of real (non-scientific nor SETI) example of usage of such a cluster? I want say - what kind of job can such a machine do, especially if generaly network latency/throuhput sucks (standard is still 100 Mbit).
Oh! I see is the biggest Telco of Mexico. isn't it?
I remember hearing about how in the future, we would be able to plug in to the internet and not only access information but also spare processing power. (...) for some computationally-intensive stuff (video editing, ray-tracing, etc.) it would be perfect.
It's easy enough for SETI which will verify results, and most would be simply discarded. Same with cracking crypto challenges and a few other. But what about video editing, ray-tracing? Someone could just insert junk into it, and you'd never know until you saw it. I'd take reliability over that extra power any day.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
All my "corporate desktops" are running as a cluster 24/7.
Initialy the idea was just to simplify maintenance, but doing a make -j 128 kernel_image is quite fun.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
This seems quite similar to the concept of Inferno (http://www.vitanuova.com/ from Vita Nuova Limited, except Inferno runs hosted on the operating system (it can run natively). Similar concept, different implementation. I'll stick with Plan 9, though :)
www.sitetronics.com/wordpress
<yawn, stretch>
Dave
ComputeMode
Just thinking of Satan and how it was renamed to Santa. Sheesh.
:)
Hummmmm. Maybe Satan and Choas go together.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Does this also mean: no swap?
I use this daily to wake up my machines on the LAN from a wireless laptop. I've yet to see a machine that doesn't respond to this - of course I'm tending to use integrated NICs which don't require a separate jumper, but most BIOSes will wake on PCI events too...
Converting my old MPEG2 encoded porno movie collection into DivX could really benefit from this.
My ol' PII 300 takes a night per movie basically.
Been going for 60 nights now, only 300 to go.
Could this be a way to get the hole shebang done in a night?
What a wonderous time we live in.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
This is approximately how desktop systems should work... As standard in the daytime.
The typical user only makes use of around 1-5% of the power of their machine. That's 95% of your investment sitting doing sweet FA.
So, your OS should have network load balancing built in and when you start a process or sub process it should run on the fastest kit available.
It's very simple to tack this kind of functionality on to Unix (including Linux here). Mozix does it in a rather nicely integrated fashion, but you can add something like SGE and some wrappers to make any network of Unix boxes act as a coherent system with *very* serious horsepower, or Wattage since we're in the 21st century.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Most clustering software provides little or no security -- its not like OpenMOSIX is going to switch to an AES network protocol at the cost of a 90% performance hit. So now imagine every workstation on your network, from HR to the executive staff, completely accessible to remote jobs, and each of these "jobs" could easily access the drive in the standard fashion. You might as well share out the system partition read/write to the network...
Wake On LAN???? What exactly does Wake do? PCs are not truely powered down (if on atx power supplies). They provide 5 volts of pwoer to ethernets/modems to enable them to recieve wol/wor commands.
Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "zombie process"
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.
This has been done before.
Oh, voluntarily? Never mind.
In Soviet Russia, Linux runs you!
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
I was thinking about "cheaper than free" software -- a Linux distro that turned your broadband-equipped computer into a cluster node while idle -- a couple of years ago. All that computing power going to waste ..... But I couldn't find a way to build a business model around it -- it was just too hit-and-miss for any task I could think of. What data is there that can be batch-processed in a completely non-time-critical fashion, and is so non-security-critical that it can potentially be shown to thousands of strangers?
..... in the end, it won't really do anything an old transverse four and man-tran can't, apart from drink fuel and leave you wondering why you bothered.
..... remote CPU time and bandwidth are only available for fleeting moments.
You could encrypt everything {and that would go some way to prevent tampering with the returned results}; but then, if you're going to process encrypted input and return encrypted results, that will eat a lot of your processing power. It's a bit like putting a V8 engine through a three-speed automatic transmission
There is a possibility of "inter-cycling" in certain, limited settings {using corporate desktop machines which typically have only a few gigs of apps and data for RAID-like backups of servers springs immediately to mind}. But outside of these circumstances, switching off when not in use and recycling when done with are the best ways of avoiding waste. There is often plenty of life in a used machine if it doesn't have to run a bloated graphical desktop environment and numerous accessories {wanted and otherwise}. And at least used PCs are something you can store up till you have enough of them to do the task you want to do
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
And for those companies with older software and hardware, good old Win95 on harddrive, customized boot disk on floppy drive and WinNuke to boot 'em up goes just as well! :)
http://codeandlife.com
My company already runs Windows on desktops and there's more than enough "chaos" during the day without more needed during the night...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I'm no clustering guru, but I tried OpenMosix and wasnt impressed with the performance at all. While I havent yet tried OpenSSI, I see time and time again that it is far superior to OpenMosix and accomplishes the same objective (SMP emulation over network).
If you're into clustering, consider trying openssi as well as OpenMosix
Unfortunately, CHAOS isn't one of them. There was an article on CHAOS in Linux Magazine in 1996-97 somewhere. It stood for CHeap Array of Obsolete Systems. The author put together a set of 386, 486, and Pentium boxes that he bought bundled on a pallet. I think he used slackware and beowulf, but in the end, it actually had some pretty significant computing power. The computational power/Kwatt hour ratio wasn't very good though. I wonder if he ever had to run his furnace in the winter?
I've got the Cheap and Obsolete part of his setup already, but not setup in an array.
yecrom2
I don't know about your computers but on mine PXE comes before CDROM,FLOPPY,HD boots.
I am sure the sysadmins using this would make sure of this too.
The truth about Led Zep should never be told on
This would augment mainframes that number crunch 24/7
The several large offices I've worked at keep desktops powered on at night. I have to assume the answer is that the energy cost isn't that great.
A company can also sell its extra computing power, so it can be a valuable asset.
The Pure Hacking website quote sounds more like gratuitous sexual innuendo rather than a business solution. Just get protection for nighttime internal penetration testing!
similar thing, without the reboots:
Build a heterogeneous cluster with coLinux and openMosix
A software package that controls my companies computers and it's called CHAOS? Where do I sign up?
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
Nice. A hacking company wants me to load a tiny 6 megabyte linux client into my secure network that then becomes a dumb node in my cluster, "without disturbing (or even touching) the contents of the local hard disk". A company that says they use the power to crack passwords.
Yeah, sign me up with the full knowledge of how many company network policies I would be violating, and the fact that I would not trust them as far as I could throw a datagram.
Hmmm, it quacks like a duck. I would swear they taught us this in both "Social Engineering" and Advertising. Give the "mark" a little benifit, and then take over his world.
this site has been doing it for a while. i tryed it and it was not all that bad. however it was still in alph and i did not expect much. ahref=http://www.flashmobcomputing.org/http://www. flashmobcomputing.org/>
And here I thought we were trying to use less electricity...
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
Offhand I'd say either "evangelist" or "zealot" would have been more adroit choices than "fundamentalist." Linux advocates would be far from any "religion of the book" fundamentalism based on one true text.
So point taken.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I work for an investigations firm that specializes in Computer Forensics. We are often faced with the challenge of having to brute force password protected documents etc. I know of cilian which provides a CHAOS compatible NTLM distributed brute force solution... anybody know if there are Open Source Distributed password cracking solutions available for this platform??
The one question that this raises is the big one on security. I've run Seti at a number of places. At one place I came in one day to find my computer off and all of the cat5 pulled out of my hub. The network admin (not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree) had noticed "strange traffic" on the network and traced it down to my machine. He then claimed that the whole network was acting funny and it was my fault. I'm no MSCE (nor do I ever care to be), but I've admined enough networks in my day. I looked at his "strange traffic" only to find that the PDC on the network has barfed (they of course *had* no BDC) so when the pissing contest started, my souped up NT 4 dev box (which was of course running as I had Seti on it) won and became the new PDC. The network admin saw the strange charts on my screen and had freaked that some l33t haxor had hacked my box and was taking over the network. I helped him fix the issue, got my "talking to" by higher ups, and tweaked my registry so my box couldn't do that again.
Yes there is was a paranoid, inexperienced admin, but Seti *was* closed source code and so I really couldn't be sure that it wasn't a nice big back door to my network. Something to think about when entering the wonderful world of "lending" clock cycles. Frankly the idea of the app rebooting the PC and running it's own OS (with no checks and balances on accessing the local drive, etc) is not something that I would sign up for myself. I think the idea is great, but it's best left in a trusted client and preferably in a Java sandbox or the like to make sure that they're not borrowing more than just clock cycles.
If I were a corporate IT director, it's not likely that I'd let software named CHAOS on my network.
Try a name change -- something like LDCG - Linux Distributed Computing Grid to get more acceptance.
Chip H.
Its not that new. We needed to do lots of scientific number crunching. Consolidated workstations with shell and socket protocols. Better tools now.
There is an open source live CD project called "Cluster Live". It boots a cluster of thin clients and share its load by using conventional Linux kernel e.g. Red Hat Linux, etc.
http://thinux.sourceforge.net/thingindex.html
title tells all.
ALL of our systems have wake on lan disabled, and for good reason.
Many of our systems have sensative data on them. You really want to be exposing that with such a system?
Just because you CAN do something doesn't make it a good idea.
IANL, but the MOSIX License Agreement is very specific in terms how the code can be used, here are some quotes:
Hmm, it can remotely take over other computers and add them to its own processing power... sounds like the Rise of the Machines to me!
I got so tired of responding to these "Supercomputer in your office" articles, I put up a web page Cluster Urban Legends to help separate the fact from fiction.
HPC for Primates. Read Cluster Monkey
Slave to Microsoft Office by day, supercomputer with immense powers by night!
I just wanna make sure I'm hangin with John Connor when SkyNet goes online!
yeah, well it's could be a bit "funny" if someone runs a rogue PXE server + does wake on lan...
;).
Could scare someone working in the middle of the night
What would be cool is if when people left a VMWare (or similiar tool) session was launched running CHAOS. Then you could easily have all your Windows desktops added to the cluster!
We'll be getting auto mutated computers distributed around the world and evolving towards the Matrix :)
Check out http://www.llnl.gov/linux/chaos/ for the 'Clustered High Availability Operating System'...so much for new acronym, as some other people already pointed to other CHAOS projects as well
-- signed for your pleasure --
this clustering technology is super old school.. i know i'm not the only one thats thought it would be a cool idea to have computers take on certain high calculation computing tasks during times of idle.
i've seen some clustering projects come and go.. i really wish i could see some sweet software developed for the virtual architecture in which the cluster creates. the wonderful idea of cheap super computing solutions has yet to diminish, but i still don't see many potential buyers..
- Hi I'm Linus Torvalds and I pronounce Linux, Lih-nix..
The real beauty to companies using this kind of setup for crunching data is that it can run in a limited level (using Linux running on Windows) when the computer is doing other tasks but can boot into a pure Linux enviroment with no resource limitations after the user has gone home. So when the computer would otherwise be off it's crunching data. When the computer is idle (such as during meetings, lunch breaks, etc) it's crunching data. When the computer isn't being kept busy (during those minesweeper games) it's crunching data. You're Windows machines can quietly sit there creating a Linux supercomputer 24 hours a day without the user even noticing.
Companies could lease this CPU time out if they aren't needing it themselves. Imagine if this became popular how it could be useful to a company like Pixar. Instead of the time, money, and energy of hosting their own rendering farm they could lease time from companies. They could probably lease the time cheaper than they could setup their own cluster and they could lease almost unlimited amounts of time such that rendering could be sped up a lot (in real time, still the same amount of CPU time). There are lots of uses for CPU time out there so why not use it? And since these are mostly LANs the connections are much faster than attempts to do this kind of CPU time leasing in clusters over the Internet.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
This sounds exactly like what those windows boxes get turned into when it turns into a spam zombie. Or maybe this is what the next level of spam zombie will look like. It boots itself! It runs without a physical operator! It loads its own OS! It does stuff when you're not there!
I make these: http://beatseqr.com
Dumb lusers using a dumb OS during the day and the dumb computer letting a dumb OS abuse its CPU during the night? Sucky.
Simpy
Don't use them at all. Turn the damn thing off at night and save a little power for the next guy.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
We had to stop not for technical reasons but because people wouldn't let us run the code on their machines any more.