'Black Lab' Linux For G3 Clusters

ChristianC writes "'Black Lab' Linux, a relative of Yellow Dog Linux, has been released for PowerPCs (including G3s and iMacs). The distribution offers Beowulf and Cluster computing - 20 G3s at once! "

Comments

Re:Benchmark comparisons?

[Anonymous Coward]

my bet is: the G3s sux big time for this.

Whatever--to both of you.

G3s are comparable to a PII system in FPU and better in integer. I wouldn't call that "sux big time" and I sure wouldn't say that it kicks butt.

If you want FPU, you go Alpha. You want bang for buck and you're starting from scratch, Celerons or even AMDs might do you well. However, all of these assumptions go from a premise of the need solely for higher performance (using alphas) and/or starting from scratch with a budget (using Celerons).

The idea of beowulf is to build a specialized high performance cluster (with high MFLOPs, but slow interconnectivity of the nodes) from cheap off the shelf components

Eh? While true, that's only part of the picture. "Build" doesn't equate to " newpurchase."

There are, lo and behold, groups that have a bunch of G3s that were purchased for other reasons. Like who? University's who have public computing labs. Science/research labs, in general, like Macs. Some of these people might have an interest or developed a need for clustering and doing so on their current investment of computers is beats the pants off new purchases, aka makes it almost free.

Black Labs brings these people the simple option of using their current investment and/or money already pointed for Macs for other reasons (e.g. some chemistry software is preferentially run on macs). If you've looked at other clustering options for G3s (you did before you shot your mouths off, right??), you'd realize the AppleSeed project had some of these exact reasons in mind. And even here, there are pluses and minuses between using AppleSeed and Black Labs.

With iRacks!

[isaac]

A few dozen iMac logic boards in iRack cases would make for a sweet CPU farm with low specific power consumption in a very small space.

droool...

-Isaac

Usefulness of PPC Linuces?

[tgeller]

A bit of background: I've been using Macs since 1995, used to write and edit for MacWEEK, and have spoken at several Macworld Expos. I know all about the PPC's advantages -- I've run benchmarks at Ziff-Davis' labs. But when it came time for me to buy a Linux server, I went with an AMD-based machine. Simply put, practical considerations outweighed the architecture's advantages.

I won't bore you with the details, 'cause I'm sure you know them. Price, component availability, a community of support, yadda yadda yadda. Although I really wanted to use a PPC-based machine, I had to ask myself: What advantages would I gain?

Speed? Processor speed is virtually irrelevant in Internet serving, as bandwidth and disk access are the gating factors. Striking a blow against an evil company? Apple's not so clean, and certainly can't claim better corporate morality than AMD or the screwdriver shop where I bought my Linux box. (Needless to say, there will be no Microsoft code on it. :) )

Having said that, I'm glad to see Yellow Dog continuing with its plans. Until now, there have been three PPC Linux vendors that I know of: TurboLinux, mkLinux, and LinuxPPC Inc. (not the same as LinuxPPC.org). Frankly, none of them have approached the market with the resources, experience or commitment needed to make an impact. mkLinux is the side project of a book publisher; TurboLinux does PPC support as an afterthought (and devotes $0 to PPC Linux promotion AFAIK); and LinuxPPC Inc. has problems best not discussed in public. Yellow Dog seems to be making the first real stab at the market: I hope they can eventually convince people like me that running Linux on PPC is the best deal.

-- Tom Geller

Re:Usefulness of PPC Linuces?

[TheMeld]

I think one of the big reasons for PPC linux is one of the same ones that shows up for x86 users. They want to run linux on the hardware they already have and know. PC's may be cheaper, but hardware you already own is free. Also, many many people who use linux (I might even dare to say a majority of them) dual boot. The reasons for dual booting a PC exist in the same for for Mac users. While I may not like the MacOS interface, I can understand and respect that, if someone has lots of software they already know how to use, and lots of documents they have created with them, they won't want to give up their original OS. I run linux 99% of the time, but I still have a Windows partition because there are some apps that don't exist yet for linux, or at least not in a form that I find acceptable. I've booted Windows less than a dozen times this year, but I still have it there.

Odd cross section argument

[timothy]

(Background: I've been through a number of Macintoshes and I'm on my fourth PC right now)


Like the other respondents to this point of view, I don't have an irate reply, but would agree with those other respondents as well that the total universe of Mac users is pretty broad.

Why would anyone want to run Linux / other Free OS on a Mac? That's not exactly the question here, but it seems to be lurking beneath the surface, and that same question was asked in a thread one level up from here.

I can't answer this for everyone, but here are the reasons I think that Linux and the Mac make a great combination, practically and normatively.

- Macs tend to have nice human engineering. The gulf is not as wide as it was 10 years or 5 years or maybe 2 years ago compared to the PC world, but well-labled parts, legible icons, attempts at friendlization still IMHO work better on Macs, but this comparison of course ignores that PC vendors vary tremendously in this respect.

- Macs use non-Intel chips ... the fact that they use not just a diff. manu but a different architecture is good for everyone. Here's a whopper of an analogy: what if paper was somehow constructed so it could only be written on with one sort of pen? That would seem silly, since there are lots of other choices. But software tend to be written to OSes themselves entirely dependent on their host hardware. Linux helps buck this trend (not as much as the BSDs, maybe, but still) by providing an OS which runs on multiple platforms.

- They look cool. That factor sells a lot of PCs, however unsatisfying that fact may be.

- Ubiquity. Not as many macs in the world as PCs, but the lopsided numbers / market share I think are misleading, since it's hard to go ten minutes in any US city and avoid seeing either an ad or an actual iMac / G3, not to mention older and still humming Macs.

- The Mac OS begs for a replacement, or at least whines a little. I use one at work (an iMac) and am actually fairly happy with it (Most of my complaints I list on my web page and will skip here) but it crashes all the time! I would love to be running an underlying *nix, whether it still looked like the basically-well-conceived Mac OS or like my home linux machine.

I don't understand why Apple pulled the plug on clones -- how about because they were making Apple look slow by releasing faster, cheaper machines? -- but I wish they hadn't. Then we could perhaps be running on a G3 PowerComputing box with SCSI, firewire and USB by now ...

anyhow. I don't have a home mac, but if I find a cheap one I'd like to run some free OS on it.

timothy

Re:I wouldn't trust them yet

[Yellow Dog]

I appreciate your concern about the number of employees at Terra Soft Solutions as new companies are often undermanned and overwhelmed ... however, I would like for you to rest assured that there are seven of us and Dan has quite a bit of help these days :) If you used our official installation support system and did not find it to be a good experience, I welcome your feedback, thank you.

Kai Staats