we might have geeks w/ arm muscles now...
seriously, would you want want to sit at your desk/chair/whatever and hold one of these things up for more than 5 minutes? just thinking about it, i lifted up my ( 3-button ball mouse, but equiv. weight, I'm sure ) mouse for about 30 seconds and realized this would take some getting used to ( and I'm the kind of geek that does push-ups in the morning and rides mountain bikes )
yes...
i see it
and like every other intelligent person i know, i don't run screaming through the streets 'cause i'm worried about the sky falling in. Tensor is right, but i think (he | she) might be exaggerating the impact it had on the average person, or at least the average person i know ( which covers everything from computer geeks to die-hard rednecks ). the media really are blowing these things out of proportion. i dont know a single person who is worried about flying, or being shot by snipers, or anthrax, besides my mother, and she was scared shitless of flying, strangers, and quite a few other things her entire life.
everyone i know has said, god, what a tragedy, or check your mail carefully, or if some guy stands up and starts shouting on a plane, kick his ass.
i think the only people that are worried about this are the ones that are using this to push their own agendas. i'm willing to bet that most people you talk to aren't really worried ( and by worried, i mean terrified, not recognizing something as a potential danger ) about these things that the government flogs, and the ones that are are of subnormal intelligence.
there's damn good reasons why i don't watch tv ( and esp. not the news ) much : i don't need anyone else to tell me what to think. i live in houston, texas, #3 or #4 on the tactical hit list in a war situation, and we have approximately 20,000 violent crimes a year in this city, more if you count the outlying suburbs in the county. most intelligent people i know worry about things that matter, are willing to stand up for themselves, and know the politicians are full of it.
then again, houston being the fattest city in the country, we might just be too busy eating ring-dings to give a shit...
hmm...i wonder what the click scores of the following would be :
1) microsoft article
2) linux article
3) microsoft vs. linux article
my bets are that #3 gets the most press, at least in technical circles
or at least the most shock-value attention
bend over and prepare for the script-kiddie-and-virus gang bang that is about to happen...
changes in the beowulf environment + community
on
Ask Donald Becker
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Donald,
As a member of the beowulf@beowulf.org, I have noticed that your posts generally seem to be of a technical, "yes/no, this is how you do it", etc. nature ( which is quite good actually ), and I've never really seen much stating your opinion on the way things are. I've got a few questions :
1) how do you feel about high-speed interfaces, and the parallel code ( i.e. various flavors of MPI ) to take advantage of them? I noticed that every time benchmarks come up for Myrinet or SCI interfaces, we get a minor flamewar between said parties, and noone ever really mentions Infiniband ( and Gigabit ethernet to ea. node is still prohibitively expensive in terms of price/performance at the switch level ). This also brings up issues of free vs. propietary interfaces and software. What do you think are the futures of these technologies, and which model do you prefer : open source or Whatever Gets The Job Done(TM)?
2) why did you pick Linux, as opposed to, say, one of the BSDs? At the time when you started doing Beowulfs, GNU/Linux wasn't the beloved child of the community that it is now, so what prompted the choice?
3) also, what do you see the next wave of clustering to be? We saw mainframes ( Shared Memory Processors ), then high-powered clusters ( ala SP2 + SP3, SMP on ea. node, but no contiguous RAM across all nodes natively ), then the introduction of COTS ( Commodity-Off-The-Shelf ) Beowulfs, then next-generation Beowulfs ( higher-end dual ( sometimes quad or even now some Xeon NUMA boxen ) processor, large amounts of RAM, high-speed SCSI disks, 64 bit PCI or PCI-X, etc. ), which argues that the community goes w/ the next bright idea ( which is dependent on hardware ), and companies go w/ whatever gives them the most bang for their buck. Where do you think we're going now ( as far as the major trend, since there is no 1 answer to the various problems that MPPs are used to address )? Low power consumption, low-heat large farms? I'm all ears...
Anyways, whether these questions get answered or not, thanks for the hard work you've done and all you've given to the community.
sorry for the late reply, but I just saw this, and the approximate 1000 dollars isn't BS :
~130 USD case : Cooler Master case
~30 USD for a good ATX power supply, I'm not going to quote this one
~140 USD ASUS VIA chipset motherboard, supports DDR333 and DDR266, most Athlons and Durons, pretty damn good motherboard, supposedly not hard to overclock ( I haven't done it, but I do own one of these things and it is nice ) :
scroll to bottom of page
~120 for a Athlon 2[0-2]00+ not a 2200, but close
~150 USD for brand-name DDR333 RAM : middle of the page
~250 USD for the Geforce4 Ti4600 : towards bottom of page
let's say another 200 for the CD-RW ( which will probably be a CD-RW/DVD drive ) and DVD drive, and then ~ 200 for the disk, which is almost certainly going to be using the onboard RAID that comes on the higher-end AV7333 motherboards ( since they don't mention an additional RAID card ), so that bring us to :
approximately 1300 USD, padding a little bit for cabling. when you include the fact that you will probably want to buy this from your local reputable PC vendor ( to avoid long-distance warranty hassles), add %10, for about 1450 USD, which is still 1000 under their cheapest system.
i was off by a bit, but not much. of course, this means you have to put it together yourself, and we should probably throw another 100 dollars in for fans, heatsink, and thermal paste, but it's all brand name kit, and provided you know what you're doing and are willing to spend the 2 hours assembling it and the hour getting the cooling right, you just saved yourself a 1000 USD.
this isn't to sound like an asshole, I just don't like being told I'm spreading B.S. about something I know fairly well. Been putting these damn things together since I was 8 years old, and plan to be doing it when I'm 80.
late.
2,800 USD for this thing? you could buy all the components for approximately 1000, it doesn't even mention dual processors, which I would expect for this kind of money, and I imagine the only part that would be any trouble to assemble is the water-cooling system. the only reason i would pay for this is maybe the warranty factor, but you could buy components retail w/ a 3 or more year warranty and still come in well under that figure.
though I might be talking out my ass for the newer P4's, since I haven't been CPU-shopping in a few months.
a majority of the people that would use this technology would use it responsibly, but there would be that %15 that would use it just like another script kiddie DDOS tool, and ruin any chance of anyone else being taken seriously
there's a lot of ways to facilitate change, but the one thing that they have in common is each person does a little, and the only way large changes come about is by a large number of people. this tool would put a disproportionate amount of power in the hands of a small number of people ( i can see it now:
protest_leader : dammit, we only have 5 protesters
protester_1 : hey, let's just change the time unit from M to N
protest_leader: even better, let's up it to O
) and thus a DDOS happens, ruining the credubility of anyone participating in this form of civil protest.
if you want to change something w/ your digital means, use e-mail/web-pages/chat groups to organize, discuss, and plan. an anonymous spam/HTTP request shows little imagination and commitment.
better yet, go look up your local chapter of Food Not Bombs, which I used to do as a teenage punk rocker. it's a lot of fun, you get to cook great food, hang out, and make a social difference by giving good food to people that need it. or whatever other group satisfies your political/social idealogies.
and as nice as the thought of influencing society via negative ( punishment-oriented ) actions against what you percieve to be the offending member/group, it has a history of either being either detrimental to your cause or ( witness the history of Russia and Germany ) spiraling out of control and just becoming another form of control and power, to be fought against itself. sometimes the best thing you can do is to do something that might not be as immediately gratifying, but positively ( growth-oriented ) aligned that shows your opinion and might even cause a small change
"send in vanilla ice" skit
for those of you who haven't heard the skit, it's hilarious...fire up gtk-gnutella, download it, and laugh your ass off while "stealing music"
it takes a lot of potshots at bitchass "musicians" who espouse ignorant opinions and suck corporate disk, though the sacred cows of his time were mc hammer and vanilla ice, while we have nelly and spears ( two of the most fucking useless excuses for sentient human beings sucking up air on this planet, possibly even dumber than their fans )...
"We want to hit fans with the message that downloading music illegally is, as Britney Spears explains, the same as going into a CD store and stealing the CD,"
you know, i don't download music from artists that i dont own ( or have owned ) at least one of their CDs or ( in the case of spoken word poets ) books, so im sort of neutral in this argument, but the concept of britney spears explaining anything to anyone is vaguely insulting to the human race, though i doubt hillary rosen would recognize that, having turned in her membership card a long time ago
fuck it, ill let her hit me with the message if i just get to hit her
perl -pi -e "s/.*(vfat|ntfs|msdos).*\n//g"/etc/fstab
and a little bit of resize2fs or growe2fs magic ( it was growe2fs, wasn't it? i'm sitting on a rh7.3 box right now )....
to IBM's eLiza are currently doing? gimme a break...all those cheapass CEO's who won't cough up any money for Chipkill memory and other self-healing or self-diagnosing hardware are going to go ga-ga for this? The ultimate result of stuff like this is going to be :
1) hardware that is easier to diagnose ( which is already to a degree )
2) some hardware that is more fault-tolerant
3) %50 reduction in the screwdriver monkeys, %25 reduction in the type of "admins" who have 5 years experience but still need you to write them instructions for a Solaris install
4) and a lot of happy sysadmins/engineers of real caliber who don't have to deal with the idiots anymore
5) followed by the same sysadmins being very unhappy when they realize they don't have anyone to foist the lusers off onto
6) followed by a/. article stating that while there are plenty of MCSEs at large ( or asking "would you like fries with that" ), good sysadmins are still expensive
7) followed by another/. article about gee-whiz hardware that will get rid of sysadmins
/. wins first place.
for running a microsoft visual studio.net ad w/ this story
seriously, this actually has a chance, look at the list of members/sponsors at : their website
and the concept of a contiguous online identity is coming anyways, so someone has to offer an alternative to the crap microsoft has been plugging
. i'm really looking forward to offering my family members who are just in love w/ what ms already offers something else, running on a secure(r) platform
but does this mean I can finally bring a gun to work?
how about throwing MCSEs off the property? or hitting the new admin w/ a taser when he gives a user root so they can install software on their machine?
( gleefully rubbing hands together while entertaining thoughts )
don't we all? i wrote a bit of perl that takes a list of sites, sorts them by least ping time, and then updates a tree of redhat updates, everything from redhat 6,2 to 7,3, moves (most of the time correctly) the old RPMs to an unused directory, and then i use another perl script ( run from the client-side) to stepp through and update the appropriate RPMs. by arch and number of processors ( SMP or not ). not a perfect system, and we're looking at using Ximian Corporate Connect ( which is pretty slick, even if it's not fully functional ), but it's a matter of money. well, gotta go, the cat just tipped over the trashcan i was vomiting into, and is now attempting to lick it up!
in theory : yes
in reality : not a chance
we might get rid of a few screwdriver jockeys, but you still need someone to set up the system ( be it a laptop or a beowulf cluster ), tune it for performance, and be there to fix it when it fails or doesn't perform up to par.
with the inevitable advance of technology ( yes systems are becoming _far_ more complex ) comes greater design challenges, admin challenges, etc. - for example, the BIOS in a machine might be able to tell you what part has failed, rather than you having to sort it out on your own after the machine keeps crashing - but while this thing that might have consumed half a morning five years ago is now solved, there are a host of other tricky and interesting things for admins to work on that have come about in the past five years - take it from a beowulf admin, there's always a need for a smart tech who can design systems, diagnose problems, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
we might have geeks w/ arm muscles now...
seriously, would you want want to sit at your desk/chair/whatever and hold one of these things up for more than 5 minutes? just thinking about it, i lifted up my ( 3-button ball mouse, but equiv. weight, I'm sure ) mouse for about 30 seconds and realized this would take some getting used to ( and I'm the kind of geek that does push-ups in the morning and rides mountain bikes )
their server as well... /. effect!
viva la
yes...
i see it
and like every other intelligent person i know, i don't run screaming through the streets 'cause i'm worried about the sky falling in. Tensor is right, but i think (he | she) might be exaggerating the impact it had on the average person, or at least the average person i know ( which covers everything from computer geeks to die-hard rednecks ). the media really are blowing these things out of proportion. i dont know a single person who is worried about flying, or being shot by snipers, or anthrax, besides my mother, and she was scared shitless of flying, strangers, and quite a few other things her entire life.
everyone i know has said, god, what a tragedy, or check your mail carefully, or if some guy stands up and starts shouting on a plane, kick his ass. i think the only people that are worried about this are the ones that are using this to push their own agendas. i'm willing to bet that most people you talk to aren't really worried ( and by worried, i mean terrified, not recognizing something as a potential danger ) about these things that the government flogs, and the ones that are are of subnormal intelligence.
there's damn good reasons why i don't watch tv ( and esp. not the news ) much : i don't need anyone else to tell me what to think. i live in houston, texas, #3 or #4 on the tactical hit list in a war situation, and we have approximately 20,000 violent crimes a year in this city, more if you count the outlying suburbs in the county. most intelligent people i know worry about things that matter, are willing to stand up for themselves, and know the politicians are full of it.
then again, houston being the fattest city in the country, we might just be too busy eating ring-dings to give a shit...
hmm...i wonder what the click scores of the following would be :
1) microsoft article
2) linux article
3) microsoft vs. linux article
my bets are that #3 gets the most press, at least in technical circles
or at least the most shock-value attention
bend over and prepare for the script-kiddie-and-virus gang bang that is about to happen...
Donald,
As a member of the beowulf@beowulf.org, I have noticed that your posts generally seem to be of a technical, "yes/no, this is how you do it", etc. nature ( which is quite good actually ), and I've never really seen much stating your opinion on the way things are. I've got a few questions :
1) how do you feel about high-speed interfaces, and the parallel code ( i.e. various flavors of MPI ) to take advantage of them? I noticed that every time benchmarks come up for Myrinet or SCI interfaces, we get a minor flamewar between said parties, and noone ever really mentions Infiniband ( and Gigabit ethernet to ea. node is still prohibitively expensive in terms of price/performance at the switch level ). This also brings up issues of free vs. propietary interfaces and software. What do you think are the futures of these technologies, and which model do you prefer : open source or Whatever Gets The Job Done(TM)?
2) why did you pick Linux, as opposed to, say, one of the BSDs? At the time when you started doing Beowulfs, GNU/Linux wasn't the beloved child of the community that it is now, so what prompted the choice?
3) also, what do you see the next wave of clustering to be? We saw mainframes ( Shared Memory Processors ), then high-powered clusters ( ala SP2 + SP3, SMP on ea. node, but no contiguous RAM across all nodes natively ), then the introduction of COTS ( Commodity-Off-The-Shelf ) Beowulfs, then next-generation Beowulfs ( higher-end dual ( sometimes quad or even now some Xeon NUMA boxen ) processor, large amounts of RAM, high-speed SCSI disks, 64 bit PCI or PCI-X, etc. ), which argues that the community goes w/ the next bright idea ( which is dependent on hardware ), and companies go w/ whatever gives them the most bang for their buck. Where do you think we're going now ( as far as the major trend, since there is no 1 answer to the various problems that MPPs are used to address )? Low power consumption, low-heat large farms? I'm all ears...
Anyways, whether these questions get answered or not, thanks for the hard work you've done and all you've given to the community.
Usenet is NEVER going to be used by normal people
and I thought the alt.sex.anal.hamsters was group was normal...
sorry for the late reply, but I just saw this, and the approximate 1000 dollars isn't BS :
~130 USD case : Cooler Master case
~30 USD for a good ATX power supply, I'm not going to quote this one
~140 USD ASUS VIA chipset motherboard, supports DDR333 and DDR266, most Athlons and Durons, pretty damn good motherboard, supposedly not hard to overclock ( I haven't done it, but I do own one of these things and it is nice ) : scroll to bottom of page
~120 for a Athlon 2[0-2]00+ not a 2200, but close
~150 USD for brand-name DDR333 RAM : middle of the page
~250 USD for the Geforce4 Ti4600 : towards bottom of page
let's say another 200 for the CD-RW ( which will probably be a CD-RW/DVD drive ) and DVD drive, and then ~ 200 for the disk, which is almost certainly going to be using the onboard RAID that comes on the higher-end AV7333 motherboards ( since they don't mention an additional RAID card ), so that bring us to :
approximately 1300 USD, padding a little bit for cabling. when you include the fact that you will probably want to buy this from your local reputable PC vendor ( to avoid long-distance warranty hassles), add %10, for about 1450 USD, which is still 1000 under their cheapest system.
i was off by a bit, but not much. of course, this means you have to put it together yourself, and we should probably throw another 100 dollars in for fans, heatsink, and thermal paste, but it's all brand name kit, and provided you know what you're doing and are willing to spend the 2 hours assembling it and the hour getting the cooling right, you just saved yourself a 1000 USD.
this isn't to sound like an asshole, I just don't like being told I'm spreading B.S. about something I know fairly well. Been putting these damn things together since I was 8 years old, and plan to be doing it when I'm 80.
late.
2,800 USD for this thing? you could buy all the components for approximately 1000, it doesn't even mention dual processors, which I would expect for this kind of money, and I imagine the only part that would be any trouble to assemble is the water-cooling system. the only reason i would pay for this is maybe the warranty factor, but you could buy components retail w/ a 3 or more year warranty and still come in well under that figure.
though I might be talking out my ass for the newer P4's, since I haven't been CPU-shopping in a few months.
a majority of the people that would use this technology would use it responsibly, but there would be that %15 that would use it just like another script kiddie DDOS tool, and ruin any chance of anyone else being taken seriously :
there's a lot of ways to facilitate change, but the one thing that they have in common is each person does a little, and the only way large changes come about is by a large number of people. this tool would put a disproportionate amount of power in the hands of a small number of people ( i can see it now
protest_leader : dammit, we only have 5 protesters
protester_1 : hey, let's just change the time unit from M to N
protest_leader: even better, let's up it to O
) and thus a DDOS happens, ruining the credubility of anyone participating in this form of civil protest.
if you want to change something w/ your digital means, use e-mail/web-pages/chat groups to organize, discuss, and plan. an anonymous spam/HTTP request shows little imagination and commitment.
better yet, go look up your local chapter of Food Not Bombs, which I used to do as a teenage punk rocker. it's a lot of fun, you get to cook great food, hang out, and make a social difference by giving good food to people that need it. or whatever other group satisfies your political/social idealogies.
and as nice as the thought of influencing society via negative ( punishment-oriented ) actions against what you percieve to be the offending member/group, it has a history of either being either detrimental to your cause or ( witness the history of Russia and Germany ) spiraling out of control and just becoming another form of control and power, to be fought against itself. sometimes the best thing you can do is to do something that might not be as immediately gratifying, but positively ( growth-oriented ) aligned that shows your opinion and might even cause a small change
"send in vanilla ice" skit
for those of you who haven't heard the skit, it's hilarious...fire up gtk-gnutella, download it, and laugh your ass off while "stealing music"
it takes a lot of potshots at bitchass "musicians" who espouse ignorant opinions and suck corporate disk, though the sacred cows of his time were mc hammer and vanilla ice, while we have nelly and spears ( two of the most fucking useless excuses for sentient human beings sucking up air on this planet, possibly even dumber than their fans )...
"We want to hit fans with the message that downloading music illegally is, as Britney Spears explains, the same as going into a CD store and stealing the CD,"
you know, i don't download music from artists that i dont own ( or have owned ) at least one of their CDs or ( in the case of spoken word poets ) books, so im sort of neutral in this argument, but the concept of britney spears explaining anything to anyone is vaguely insulting to the human race, though i doubt hillary rosen would recognize that, having turned in her membership card a long time ago
fuck it, ill let her hit me with the message if i just get to hit her
perl -pi -e "s/.*(vfat|ntfs|msdos).*\n//g" /etc/fstab
and a little bit of resize2fs or growe2fs magic ( it was growe2fs, wasn't it? i'm sitting on a rh7.3 box right now )....
1) hardware that is easier to diagnose ( which is already to a degree )
2) some hardware that is more fault-tolerant
3) %50 reduction in the screwdriver monkeys, %25 reduction in the type of "admins" who have 5 years experience but still need you to write them instructions for a Solaris install
4) and a lot of happy sysadmins/engineers of real caliber who don't have to deal with the idiots anymore
5) followed by the same sysadmins being very unhappy when they realize they don't have anyone to foist the lusers off onto
6) followed by a
7) followed by another
then the cycle will renew itself...
boxen ain't a word
since ain't is a word now...
seriously, this actually has a chance, look at the list of members/sponsors at : their website
and the concept of a contiguous online identity is coming anyways, so someone has to offer an alternative to the crap microsoft has been plugging . i'm really looking forward to offering my family members who are just in love w/ what ms already offers something else, running on a secure(r) platform
how about throwing MCSEs off the property? or hitting the new admin w/ a taser when he gives a user root so they can install software on their machine?
( gleefully rubbing hands together while entertaining thoughts )don't we all? i wrote a bit of perl that takes a list of sites, sorts them by least ping time, and then updates a tree of redhat updates, everything from redhat 6,2 to 7,3, moves (most of the time correctly) the old RPMs to an unused directory, and then i use another perl script ( run from the client-side) to stepp through and update the appropriate RPMs. by arch and number of processors ( SMP or not ). not a perfect system, and we're looking at using Ximian Corporate Connect ( which is pretty slick, even if it's not fully functional ), but it's a matter of money. well, gotta go, the cat just tipped over the trashcan i was vomiting into, and is now attempting to lick it up!
in theory : yes in reality : not a chance we might get rid of a few screwdriver jockeys, but you still need someone to set up the system ( be it a laptop or a beowulf cluster ), tune it for performance, and be there to fix it when it fails or doesn't perform up to par. with the inevitable advance of technology ( yes systems are becoming _far_ more complex ) comes greater design challenges, admin challenges, etc. - for example, the BIOS in a machine might be able to tell you what part has failed, rather than you having to sort it out on your own after the machine keeps crashing - but while this thing that might have consumed half a morning five years ago is now solved, there are a host of other tricky and interesting things for admins to work on that have come about in the past five years - take it from a beowulf admin, there's always a need for a smart tech who can design systems, diagnose problems, etc.