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Debian Cluster Replaces Supercomputer For Weather Forecasting
wazza brings us a story about the Philippine government's weather service (PAGASA), which has recently used an eight-PC Debian cluster to replace an SGI supercomputer. The system processes data from local sources and the Global Telecommunication System, and it has reduced monthly operational costs by a factor of 20. Quoting:
"'We tried several Linux flavours, including Red Hat, Mandrake, Fedora etc,' said Alan Pineda, head of ICT and flood forecasting at PAGASA. 'It doesn't make a dent in our budget; it's very negligible.' Pineda said PAGASA also wanted to implement a system which is very scalable. All of the equipment used for PICWIN's data gathering comes off-the-shelf, including laptops and mobile phones to transmit weather data such as temperature, humidity, rainfall, cloud formation and atmospheric pressure from field stations via SMS into PAGASA's central database."
that would be HURD
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
i would suppose that debian is quite a versatile distro for any purpose...
-- from a debian user... who actually started quite late with potato....
Actually, Debian is intended for servers and runs on more architectures than any other distro. The whole reason for the long testing cycle on Debian is to make sure it's as stable as possible so it can sit on a server and need little or no attention for days, weeks, or even months at a time.
I hated Debian at first because it wasn't friendly, but I looked into it more and realized it was the best choice I could make for my production servers. I can set them up and check once a week or so and they're still chugging along without need of intervention.
I wouldn't use Debian on my desktop (I use Kubuntu), but it can't be beat for servers.
It's NOT a desktop distro. Especially compared to Mandr* or Ubuntu or many others out there.
Debian, like most distros, is what you want it to be. Debian is used regularly as a server OS.
I doubt they have X installed on these machines.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Sure. Add in paying for tech support or the cost in man-hours it takes to keep it running. Both can make a serious dent where nobody expected to see one.
I'm sure that if they can manage an ancient SGI supercomputer, they can easily manage Debian. I've been using it since woody, and I must say, compared to many other distros, Debian is easy to manage. Not only that, its reliability is second to none on the Linux platform. I have a machine that's been running the same Debian install since the days of woody, all up-to-date with Etch. Not a single problem with it, runs a lot better than an XP desktop I have, which has needed 2 reinstalls in the past year, or Gentoo, which frequently breaks when packages fail to compile.
Many distro's add kernel patches and add different drivers to the initrd.
Also the core os ( most minimal installation ) has many different tools and libs.
Also at time of release they can pick from many different versions of a single package.
That in combination with what version of GCC and compile flags can and does make a huge differance.
And at least with Debian you really do know how the systems was build, with RedHat I still wonder...
Marcel
Because each major distro, while they use the same base kernel, GNU command line tools, and same GNOME/KDE environment, can have radically different kernel extensions and drivers implemented by one distro doing development but not another. If you're using whatever GUI tools a distro provides, they can each configure the same backend very differently, which depending on how the tool writes the config file can also effect stability, security, and other functions. Also Fedora/RHEL and tends to use tools created or modified by Red Hat specifically while those aren't easily available for Debian or SuSe, which have their own tools in the same manner.
Actually I don't like Debian much as a desktop machine, but I love it as a number cruncher OS. I've had a 10 machine openmosix cluster going for several years now, problem free.
Stability is a major thing with Debian, and my experience has been that this is quite true.
What was the age and the specs of the SGI being replaced?
Going by Moore's law, a factor of 20 performance improvement takes about 6 to 8 years. If the SGI was at least that old, this isn't news -- it's just the state of the art these days. In other words, small clusters capable of weather forcasting are relatively run-of-the-mill.
Of course, props to linux for being the enabler in this case.
Most weather prediction centers have adapted their weather forecast models to use Linux clusters. By running an operational forecast model on a cluster, it's easy for forecasters to scale the models so that they can be run (albeit slowly) on desktop machines, and are easily worked on by real meteorologists (versus IT professionals). At my university, we use a large cluster of machines on a RedHat enterprise system, and then able to scale the models and run them on multiple processors using MPICH compilers and batch jobs. Really, using a Debian cluster is no different then using a RedHat cluster. My colleague has access to the NOAA machine, which has more processors then you can shake a stick at... he talks about some code that takes 3 days to run on his personal workstation that takes 2 minutes on 40 processors. With the relatively low cost of a linux cluster, weather forecasting models can be run quickly and efficiently on numerous processors at a local level. With the ease of use of a Linux machine versus some of the supercomputers, it puts the power in the meteorologists to make those changes to the model so that it can improve forecasts.
Debian works out just fine for these kind of tasks. Here in the Netherlands the national compute cluster Lisa runs on Debian (http://www.sara.nl/userinfo/lisa/description/index.html) with 800~ to a 1000 nodes (I think the page needs updating by now).
Debian is sure not a desktop distribution. Ubuntu would be one. I run Debian on all my servers.
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
I tried: /lib/libearthquake-2.3.so.0 is not a symbolic link"
apt-get -f -y install gweather
But it failed with something about "ldconfig:
Is libearthquake in unstable?
Interactive Visual Medical Dictionary
Debian will run multiple services reliably under heavy load. From my limited experience, it's one of those distros where you "Set It And Forget It" and that's that.
Once you got it configured the way you want it, there's little intervention involved to maintaining it. It'll just keep chugging along. The keyword there is "correctly". Follow the readmes, howtos, and best practices, and you're golden.
It's also one of the oldest distributions which always kept to the spirit of GNU/Linux in general: community development and enrichment. Debian developers pride themselves on that spirit. To make the best software for humans. (At least that's what I gather from hanging out with Debian folk) These people are not only passionate in the software that they write, they do it without wanting anything in return, being humble in the way they do it, and wanting no reward for doing it. To them, their reward is in other people using their software and loving it! In my opinion they're not recognized enough.
But what do I know? I just use the software.
The binary package management really says it all.. you shouldn't be running anything but compiled source on a performance cluster.
/bin/ls though? I don't think it matters to anyone on a high performance cluster. Just so long as the cluster apps are optimised then the rest is just noise - better to have a system that's less work for your administrators so they can concentrate on what's important.
Wow - how many performance clusters do you run again?
Not that I run a "performance cluster" as such - but I do run a bunch of machines that are very busy, all on Debian.
You know what? We compile the couple of programs where CPU is the bottleneck from source. We also compile Cyrus IMAP from source because we apply a pile of patches, but if someone else was packaging up all those patches in upstream, I'd be happy for them to be compiled there. Disk IO is the issue with Cyrus, and a custom compile won't help with that.
Yeah, we build our own kernels as well - that's another point that's worth the effort to customise.
Not sure why you call Debian a desktop distro, it's much more useful as a server.
You obviously doesn't have a clue about Debian. Debian has been a fine server since 1995, and I still choose it before RHEL anyday. I have always found it strange that everyone went for RedHat, when they could have Debian. Mark S. saw the advantages of Debian and based Ubuntu on it, Ubuntu is a server and a desktop distro, based on Debian. It has made more people realize the strength of the Debian approach.
Exactly, My job is running high performance computing clusters. You don't need to put much effort into your cluster distribution at all. As long as it's stable, and gets the job done, why mess with it.
/bin/ls don't matter a bit.
The things I (and my co-workers) put a lot of optimization effort into is the kernel and our apps. You're exactly right.. 99.9% of our CPU cycles go into getting work done, and that 0.1% used by
I don't get why every one is saying it's not for desktop. It runs great on my T60. Everything works fine: sleep, mouse, red nub, wireless, sound, screen brightness, Blue-tooth. I guess I have never used the media buttons...
Money is the root of all evil?
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
They never said it can't be used for desktop. They are just saying that it isn't primarily aiming for desktop use and works very well on servers, debating the original posters claim.
You don't have to wonder with RedHat. Just look at the SRPMs and see what patches they've applied.
jh
Debian isn't - and never has been - a desktop distro. If you want a desktop distro built on Debian architecture, you get Ubuntu, or Knoppix, or one of a dozen others. Debian's unique selling proposition is a combination of stability, which is very important to production servers, and a rigorous commitment to free software. Packages don't make it into Debian Stable until they have been thoroughly tested. Debian also has the best package management system in the industry.
Frankly, I wouldn't run a server with anything else.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
That's the big attraction for Debian. For a production system, support tasks drop to almost nothing. It's there. It runs. If and when a patch is needed, it is just that - a patch - and not any weird licensing changes or mutations in functionality.
Of the linux distros, it's an excellent choice for servers, perhaps the best. Given the rock-solid nature, it can be good for enterprise desktops, if you are willing to plan. However, Kubuntu LTS meets that need.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
You customise absolutely everything yourself in Debain too, but when you have more than 50 servers running, thats not what you want. In that situation you want something dependable, stable that let you do other things. In Debian you don't ever have to reinstall, you just upgrade. I started out with Slackware, if I remember right, but since I started using Debian in 1995, I have not seen a better server,and during that time I have used quite a few. No one has served me better than Debian.
Give the guy a break. He just wanted to see Gentoo compile in less than 2 weeks; he had a cluster handy...
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
While Ubuntu might be friendlier, and be more polished, I'd like to say that Debian is perfectly workable as a desktop os. (Started with a base install that didn't even appear to come with less, moved onto fluxbox when I wanted a gui, moved back to kde because I missed it).
It just takes a little more effort if you do something pointless like start out with just the min install.
I agree. I used to run some clusters for the UCLA Chemistry department and the only real customizations we did was to install a custom kernel in Redhat 9 to handle the huge amount of memory we had installed. And even that wasn't in all the clusters. But yeah, the code the clusters was actually running was pretty much always compiled by hand.
Well, one of the things I'm running into, having walked into a RHEL-heavy shop, is that every single RH box has what I've come to derisively refer to as /usr/local/hell. Every. Single. One. Basically, because of the extreme pain of upgrading (or others' laziness, though my limited experience in the distant past says it's mostly the former), we have RHEL3, RHEL4, and RHEL5 servers, all at whatever the then-current patchlevel was (AS, ES, WS, BS, XYZS, ASS...Taroon, Macaroon, Buffoon...you get the idea), that have almost everything important duplicated in /usr/local, built from tarballs. Can't remove the system-supplied stuff, since what's left that expects it will balk, but can't use it either, since users or security concerns dictate significantly newer releases of everything from Apache to perl to php to mysql to...
This is, of course, a nightmare. Worse, the kernels on all of these have the notorious RH patchsets, so as far as anyone knows, each and every one has a mish-mash of backported "features" from newer kernels, but few of the bugs fixed that those newer ones have. In fact, several are still at 2.4.x kernels that, even years later, suffer from a kswapd problem that makes the machines unusable after a while. And we're getting in newer hardware that the 2.6 kernels that ARE supplied don't support. Everyone here has given up trying to build a plain vanilla kernel from the latest sources, because there are so many RH-applied patches to their kernels that may or may not even be applicable or available for the vanilla Linus kernels, that no one can say with any degree of certainty that the system will even boot. With Debian, I gave up on vanilla kernels because I was just tired of sitting through recompiles for the "advantage" of just removing a few things that were modules that I knew I would never use, customized to each of a half-dozen machines.
With Debian, which I've run for years without a "reinstall", updates are significantly simpler to perform, and if you want to throw backports.org into your sources.list (which may or may not be a fair thing to do), even *stable* has 2.6.22, or 2.6.18 withouth bpo in the mix. Remote updates? No problem, Debian was *designed* to be updatable like that from the start. The dpkg/apt* tools are still worlds ahead of the RH (and SUSE) equivalents. Dependencies are easier to deal with, as are conflicts, and security.d.o seems to be a lot more on the ball about patches than anyone else.
In fact, I'm often telling our security guys about updates that fix vulnerabilities that their higher-up counterparts haven't started riding them about yet, so they can get a head start on going through the major hassle of begging/cajoling/threatening the RH admins to grab the latest sources, rebuild, and re-install so we don't get slammed on the next security scan for having vulnerable servers. Not that it's ever "the latest", but always "the least amount of upgrade needed to avoid being flagged", which means that next month we go through this all again. With Debian, "aptitude update ; aptitude upgrade" (or just "aptitude"/whatever and then manually select packages, though in stable, it's only going to be fixes anyway most of the time), and the handful of systems I've gotten in under the radar are up-to-date security-wise with significantly less effort.
Even the "you get what you pay for in terms of support" canard has been proven to be false. We had a couple brand-new freshly-patched RHEL5 systems that just would not stay up. First thing RH Support has us do is run some custom tool of theirs before they'll even attempt to help us. A tool that, I should add, is rather difficult to run on a machine that goes down within minutes of coming up. Finally we re-installed and didn't apply the RH-sanctioned updates. Machine...stays up. Same thing with some RH-specific clustering software. Another RH-approved release resulted in...no clustering at all. For whatever reason, re-installing the prior RPM wasn't possible, but the
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
the code the clusters was actually running was pretty much always compiled by hand.
You really oughta use a compiler for that.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg