Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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
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~
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
Yet another blogger begging for an audience.
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).
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.
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.
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