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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."
No.
Most entreprise level desktops have Wake On LAN and PXE boot capability. You send a magic packet to each desktop to wakr it up, and then tell the PXE BIOS to boot ClusterKNoppix via TFTP.
It's not that hard to do, even for lazy sysadmins.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
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
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!
W.O.L. doesn't power-up the system when it's been shut-off, so it's really not of any use in this situation.
It doesn't sound like you've tried this.
When configured correctly, it works. We do weekly maintenance and nightly installations of software that way. In some scheduled job, all systems get a wake-on-lan packet and they start, and run some install. The users are never bothered with it, unless their systems are offline at that time (e.g. laptops).
search for "Warewulf" clusters (turning into a Beowulf at night)...it's quite old news ahref=http://warewulf.lbl.gov/http://warewulf.lbl. gov/>
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
It isn't a software thing. It's done in hardware.
You need a network card which supports it as well as a mainboard which supports it (or with built in networking, that usually supports it).
To start it up you send a "magic" package to the NIC which tells it to boot. AFAIK it's just MAC level package with all FF in the data field or something like that. The NIC will then boot the computer just as if you had pressed the power key.
Pratt & Whitney, one of the big 3 jet engine makers, has been doing that for over a decade. It is there primary means of supercomputing.
They have been at it so long that they had to write their own message passing system (PROWESS) because MPI was not there yet.
I used to work for them as a computational fluid dynamicist, we were the main consumers of this "cluster".
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
This is at night. Elecricity is cheap at night.
;-)
Well, at least in my country, where nuclear power plants like to have a steady load.
Computing on workstations at night is probably waaaaaaaaaaay cheaper than on a supercomputer during the day, then