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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
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!
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
No, but I can see companies that need to crunch large datasets installing this to do their own processing at night.
"Do you think we could wipe out world hunger forever if scientists figured out how to make AOL's Free CD's edible?"-
Seems to me that what TFA is suggesting is that organizations can use this to gain part-time Beowulf capabilities on machines that could be running Windoze or whatever during normal office hours -- they wouldn't just be giving the processing time away to some random project over the Internet (although that could easily be done too), but using it for in-house projects where an outside connection probably wouldn't even be needed in most cases.
"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
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
The actual booting could be controlled locally.
used for a task outside their control
Yeah, I'd want to see some security measures in place, like running it in User Mode Linux or something. A dedicated client program like SETI@Home is one thing. A full OS with the capability to fsck with your hardware is another.
which doesn't make them any money.
But it could help save them money. Lots of OSS users have no viable way to contribute back to their favorite projects. Lots of projects could be helped by a vast pool of computing power "on tap". Surely somebody could come up with some interesting applications for a ridiculous amount of free CPU time?
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
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!
"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
Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "zombie process"
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.
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!
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.
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
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 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
Slave to Microsoft Office by day, supercomputer with immense powers by night!