So many Linux distros, so little time!Fedora, CentOS, Ubuntu, oh my!

This has been a crazy couple of years!  We've been looking for a good 64bit Linux distribution that would fit the needs of the Computer Science and Mathematics classrooms as well as the needs of our cluster.

My Computing Independent Study (cistheta) students would like to put together a high performance cluster (HPC) to do some number crunching, fractals, openGL, ray tracing and animation. We've had good experience in the past using PVM, MPI and openMOSIX with C++ and povray. We've even used clusterKNOPPIX, parallelKNOPPIX, BCCD, QUANTIAN and pelicanHPC. But, that was in the world of 32bit....

Welcome to the 64bit universe! We fell heir to 25 dual-core AMD Athlons plus 2 quad-core Intel Xeons and have been banging our heads against the wall trying to figure out what do do with all this. Two years ago, we tried to scatter and gather jobs using bash scripts to run povray and C++ jobs to good effect. This year we tried parallelJava and openMPI over Fedora and CentOS but didn't get anywhere. We even tried Rocks.

We finally have 64bit Ubuntu 10.04 installed on all nodes and like how rock solid it is and how easy it is to maintain. We are wondering what kind of clustering environment we could install over this. Would OSCAR be a good fit?

We still have a dual boot system, but the default partition is the Linux one.  We are starting a new curriculum in Computer Math (intro to programming and discrete math) and Calculus Research Lab based on SAGE.  So, I set up the lab to be as user friendly as possible for our new kids and teachers next year.  The "Ubuntu Way" is not to have a super user or root account.  The only way to have root access is with the sudo command line and the "root" password is the same as the user password!  So, I setup each PC to boot the Linux partition, then login to the desktop without any user interaction (ie no password needed, so the students don't need to know it).  In addition to all this, Firefox is now one of the startup apps and I set the default homepage to https://clemix.clemson.edu:34567  Not only are we running Ubuntu Linux all day, every day, we also have a SAGE lab running 24x7!

I also got the Teacher Station to run my "Youtube Recording Studio" in Linux and in Windows using the exact same hardware and apps.  I cheated a bit in that Smart Notebook for Linux only comes in a 32bit version.  So, the Teacher Station was installed with the 32bit Ubuntu 10.04 CD.  BTW, the Ubuntu users mailing list is full of lots of helpful peeps!  My abundant thanx go to them, I would never have figured all this stuff out in the short amount of time I had without them!  FYI, the only reason I have time to do this at all is because its Finals Week at good ol' Baldwin High!

Teacher Station with Windows XP

(1) Smart AirLiner Tablet or Wacom Graphire BlueTooth 6x8 Tablet

(2) Smart Notebook pen app

(3) Radio Shack 75Mhz Lapel Mic

(4) SAGE or VTI math app

(5) http://screencast-o-matic.com *.mp4 recorder

Teacher Station with Ubuntu 10.04

(1) Smart AirLiner Tablet or Wacom Graphire BlueTooth 6x8 Tablet

(2) Xournal pen app

(3) Radio Shack 75Mhz Lapel Mic

(4) SAGE or VTI math app (note to self: forgot to install WINE)

(5) http://screencast-o-matic.com *.mp4 recorder

Laptop with Windows Vista (on the road at conferences)

(1) Smart AirLiner Tablet or Wacon Graphire BlueTooth 6x8 Tablet

(2) Smart Notebook pen app

(3) internal Mic

(4) SAGE or VTI math app (note to self: forgot to install WINE)

(5) http://screencast-o-matic.com *.mp4 recorder
(6) PC Podium with audio, video and Ethernet drops or wireless

Now, I installed the 64bit Ubuntu 10.04 CD the same way on every PC:

Step 1)

prepare partitions with qtparted from the KNOPPIX CD first

    /dev/sda1    fat32    42GB    (resize, but no other changes, leave wimpdoze partition alone)

    /dev/sda2    swap    256MB (change to swap)

    /dev/sda3    ext3     41GB    (change to ext3 + format + / partition)

Step 2)

boot Ubuntu CD, click install, answer onscreen questions, run install

Step 3)

when the install process is done, you reboot and remove the CD

once the PC reboots and you get to the desktop, right click the vertical arrow icon on the top right

and edit the Ethernet interfaces

    eth0 set to auto DHCP

    eth1: ip = 10.5.129.x

            mask = 255.255.0.0

            gw = 10.5.0.254

            dns = 10.1.1.19

test internet connections with Firefox to https://clemix.clemson.edu:34567 and set as default homepage

test intranet connections with nautilus/ftp to 10.5.254.245

Step 4)

system/preferences/monitors set to highest resolution allowe for your desktop (except for teacher pc)

system/preferences/screensaver set to 1 hour

system/preferences/startup add Firefox (except for teacher pc)

system/preferences/mouse set mouse to slowest accel (only teacher pc)

right click desktop and select /change background to set your background and click visual effects for compiz

system/administration/login set to no password (except for teacher pc and server)

system/administration/printers set network printer HP Laser Jet 4250 at 10.10.254.212

Step 5)

install jre1.6.0_20 as a Firefox plugin for 3D graphics in SAGE

system/preferences/networkproxy set to 10.0.0.125 system wide and:

sudo aptitude update (or system/adminitration/softwaresources, adding canonical first)

sudo aptitude safe-upgrade (optional)

sudo aptitude install sun-java6-bin sun-java6-jre sun-java6-fonts install sun-java6-plugin

(all one line in that order, could use sudo su)

dissable proxy and test firefox with about:plugins as the url to see that the jre was plugged in!

alternate Step 5 - if no proxy available)

install jre1.6.0_20 as a Firefox plugin for 3D graphics in SAGE

download jre-6u20-linux-x64.bin or jre-6u20-linux-i386.bin 

from http://java.com/en/download/installed.jsp?detect==jre&try=1

to /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins

open a terminal and 

    cd /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins

    sudo chmod 755 *.bin

    sudo ./*.bin

then

    cd ~/.mozilla

    mkdir plugins

    cd plugins

    ln -s /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins/jre1.6.0_20/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so

or

    ln -s /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins/jre1.6.0_20/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so

if libnpjp2.so is not there, then

    locate libnpjp2.so

test firefox with about:plugins as the url to see that the jre was plugged in!


another alternate Step 5 - if no proxy available)
download the *.deb files from my ftp site ftp://centauri.baldwinschools.net and follow instructions there.

Step 6)

install optional software like VLC, handbrake, xournal via aptitude+proxy or Smart Notebook from http://www.smarttech.com or games from http://packages.ubuntu.com  Actually, I don't recommend Smart Notebook as its very complicated to install and maintain.  That's why I installed xournal....

Servers need: vsftp and openssh-server

Teacher Station needs: jre, flash, wine, VLC, handbrake and xournal

Student Stations need just jre

HTH, good luck with your Linux boxes!

Teaching with Technology, 

http://mathforum.org/kb/profile.jspa?userID=32552

http://shop.ebay.com/items/_ti_calculator_active

---

KNOPPIX to the rescue!

OK, this week was a comedy of errors is my Computer Math class!

Actually it was my Advanced Computer Math class, the second semester of our pre Computer Science course. We were doing some simple object based projects in C++ recently. So, I thought it would be nice to try a graphics class. I decided to use the graphics class from "Computing Concepts with C++ Essentials" 2nd edition. I've used this class in the past without a problem.


I forgot, however, that we had upgraded our server, based on Debian, from the XFree86 to the newer Xorg Linux windowing system last summer. The graphics class we were using needs to link to the files in a directory called X11 in /usr/X11R6/lib which doesn't exist anymore! So I tried to reinstall it with the command line "sudo apt-get install libX11-dev" as suggested by some people with the same problem at Drexel University. This didn't work as apt-get reported the file deprecated in the Debian repository.



So, I downloaded the last version of QUANTIAN DVD iso (based on KNOPPIX 4.0 which, in turn, is based on Debian from 2005) and burned it for my students. This was a great fix as the old X11R6 system worked fine on a PC booted from that DVD! The problem now was that my clients have Fedora 12 installed and the burning software is a little buggy. It took so long to burn just 12 DVDs that I had to have the class burn and test the remaining 12 DVDs that we needed. What good sports!



OK, the next day my students booted up the whole class with QUANTIAN 0.7.9.2 and we were ready to go, right? Nope, the DVDs would not recognize eth1 which is configured to be used as our private Linux intranet so we can remotely store files on our sftp server. It worked fine the day before, so that network must have been down for some odd reason (never been down before).



Anyway, I showed my students how to be the "super user" and setup static IPs on their eth0s and we were finally good to go. We successfully wrote, compiled and saved a few lines of graphics code without errors and the bell rang!



I think that next week I'll download the KNOPPIX 4.0.2 CD and burn that for them. It should still have X11R6 but be a bit less buggy with our modern hardware (also faster to download, burn and boot).



...the best laid plans of mice and men.

Learning with Technology,

calcpage@aol.com
http://mathforum.org/kb/profile.jspa?userID=32552
http://shop.ebay.com/items/_ti_calculator_active

---

SHADOWFAX: Many miles left to go! (setting up openMPI clusters)

OK, nobody said it would be easy!  Whoever said "instant super computer, just add water" when referring to setting up an openMPI cluster over a LAN of 25 multi core 64-bit nodes was nuts.  Oh, yeah, that was me...

How about a little bit of history?  CIS(theta), the Computing Independent  Study class, has been around in one incarnation or another for over a decade:

2009-2010 SHADOWFAX openMPI cluster with dual core 64-bit AMD 2 GHz Athlons (work in progress).  We are trying to emulate pelicanHPC (http://idea.uab.es/mcreel/ParallelKnoppix) on a Linux Partition.  We based this cluster on the Fedora 11 CD 64-bit Linux distribution and gigaE (gigabit Ethernet).

2008-2009 CISTHETA public key authentication cluster with dual core 64-bit AMD 2 GHz Athlons (used bash scripts to scatter/gather jobs on new architecture).  We did some nice ray tracings using povray (http://www.zazzle.com/cistheta2008).  We based this cluster on the KNOPPIX DVD 32-bit Linux distribution and fastE (100 megabit Ethernet).

1997-2007 CENTAURI openMOSIX cluster with various Pentium class processors (modified load balancing Linux Kernel that automatically sent jobs to other nodes whenever a node was overworked).  We also dabbled with Beowulf, PVM and MPI.  We based this cluster primarily on cluster KNOPPIX (http://clusterknoppix.sw.be), QUANTIAN (http://www.quantian.org) and BCCD (http://bccd.net) and basE (10 megabit Ethernet). For the last few years, we installed the QUANTIAN DVD to a Linux Partition and used a dual boot lab (with WimpDoze).  We did some nice fractals with the fork() method of g++ (http://cistheta2007.deviantart.com).

The main difference between CISTHETA and SHADOWFAX is twofold. Last year, CISTHETA did not implement any clustering environment like MPI.  We simply broke up our jobs into slices and sent and recieved results using bash scripts.  Another main difference was that we set up public key authenticated ssh clients such that you could login as "cluster" on any node, and be automagically logged into all nodes.  In fact, you could ssh to any node with or without the userid (cluster) and you did not need a passwd.  Lets call that "static public key authenticated ssh."  The static method is set up once and used many times.  This year we are using something I'll call "dynamic public key authenticated ssh," such that the RSA keys are generated on the fly.  Under both schemes, the user could start a parallel job from any node making that node the master node and control any number of other nodes as workers.

What's frustrating about all this, is that most of the clustering software we've tried seem to work great "right out of the box" on any one multi core node.  In other words, SMP works by default, but extending the parallel jobs over a cluster of such nodes is a production!  These clustering packages are as follows:

parallelJava: http://www.cs.rit.edu/~ark/pj.shtml
parallelPython: http://www.parallelpython.com & http://www.sagemath.org/doc/numerical_sage/mpi4py.html
openMPI: http://www.open-mpi.org
dSAGE: http://www.sagemath.org and http://www.sagemath.org/tour-research.html

We've gotten openMPI's Torque severs to work with gcc.  However, the Linux distro we based our new cluster on this year was the Fedora 11 CD 64-bit version.  I think we may need to start over with the Fedora 12 DVD 64-bit Linux distribution so as to include g++ as well.  We may all need to re implement "static public key authenticated ssh" which worked very well last year....

Happy Clustering,

calcpage@aol.com

http://mathforum.org/kb/profile.jspa?userID=32552

---

SHADOWFAX: Many miles left to go! (setting up openMPI clusters)

OK, nobody said it would be easy!  Whoever said "instant super computer, just add water" when referring to setting up an openMPI cluster over a LAN of 25 multi core 64-bit nodes was nuts.  Oh, yeah, that was me...

How about a little bit of history?  CIS(theta), the Computing Independent  Study class, has been around in one incarnation or another for over a decade:

2009-2010 SHADOWFAX openMPI cluster with dual core 64-bit AMD 2 GHz Athlons (work in progress).  We are trying to emulate pelicanHPC (http://idea.uab.es/mcreel/ParallelKnoppix) on a Linux Partition.  We based this cluster on the Fedora 11 CD 64-bit Linux distribution and gigaE (gigabit Ethernet).

2008-2009 CISTHETA public key authentication cluster with dual core 64-bit AMD 2 GHz Athlons (used bash scripts to scatter/gather jobs on new architecture).  We did some nice ray tracings using povray (http://www.zazzle.com/cistheta2008).  We based this cluster on the KNOPPIX DVD 32-bit Linux distribution and fastE (100 megabit Ethernet).

1997-2007 CENTAURI openMOSIX cluster with various Pentium class processors (modified load balancing Linux Kernel that automatically sent jobs to other nodes whenever a node was overworked).  We also dabbled with Beowulf, PVM and MPI.  We based this cluster primarily on cluster KNOPPIX (http://clusterknoppix.sw.be), QUANTIAN (http://www.quantian.org) and BCCD (http://bccd.net) and basE (10 megabit Ethernet). For the last few years, we installed the QUANTIAN DVD to a Linux Partition and used a dual boot lab (with WimpDoze).  We did some nice fractals with the fork() method of g++ (http://cistheta2007.deviantart.com).

The main difference between CISTHETA and SHADOWFAX is twofold. Last year, CISTHETA did not implement any clustering environment like MPI.  We simply broke up our jobs into slices and sent and recieved results using bash scripts.  Another main difference was that we set up public key authenticated ssh clients such that you could login as "cluster" on any node, and be automagically logged into all nodes.  In fact, you could ssh to any node with or without the userid (cluster) and you did not need a passwd.  Lets call that "static public key authenticated ssh."  The static method is set up once and used many times.  This year we are using something I'll call "dynamic public key authenticated ssh," such that the RSA keys are generated on the fly.  Under both schemes, the user could start a parallel job from any node making that node the master node and control any number of other nodes as workers.

What's frustrating about all this, is that most of the clustering software we've tried seem to work great "right out of the box" on any one multi core node.  In other words, SMP works by default, but extending the parallel jobs over a cluster of such nodes is a production!  These clustering packages are as follows:

parallelJava: http://www.cs.rit.edu/~ark/pj.shtml
parallelPython: http://www.parallelpython.com & http://www.sagemath.org/doc/numerical_sage/mpi4py.html
openMPI: http://www.open-mpi.org
dSAGE: http://www.sagemath.org and http://www.sagemath.org/tour-research.html

We've gotten openMPI's Torque severs to work with gcc.  However, the Linux distro we based our new cluster on this year was the Fedora 11 CD 64-bit version.  I think we may need to start over with the Fedora 12 DVD 64-bit Linux distribution so as to include g++ as well.  We may all need to re implement "static public key authenticated ssh" which worked very well last year....

Happy Clustering,

calcpage@aol.com

http://mathforum.org/kb/profile.jspa?userID=32552

---

Meeting VI

Today's Aim: Enabling sshd and public keys
Tonight's Reading: Building Parallel Programs, Chapter 6
This Week's Research: openMPI

Attending Tues: JeremyA, SteveB, ArthurD (public keys)
Attending Thurs: JeremyA, DevinB (debugging scripts)

This Tuesday we are enabling sshd servers on all nodes of ShadowFax, our superCluster.  We also have to generate all 25 keys for pulic key authentication!  This way, we create one common user on each node that you can log into from any node.  Once you log into one node with this userid/passwd, you can ssh to any other node using the same userid without even specifying the userid or passwd, just each ip address!  This makes it very easy to set up a master/worker cluster model (see last year's cluster blogs).  openMPI also needs this as a foundation.
I discussed how to set up public key authentication, http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=28933, on the knoppix forum way back in June 2008.  Also, we are following these notes http://dvbmonkey.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/getting-started-with-open-mpi-on-fedora about setting up openMPI on Fedora!

Happy Clustering,

calcpage@aol.com
http://mathforum.org/kb/profile.jspa?userID=32552

---

Meeting VI

Today's Aim: Enabling sshd and public keys
Tonight's Reading: Building Parallel Programs, Chapter 6
This Week's Research: openMPI

Attending Tues: JeremyA, SteveB, ArthurD (public keys)
Attending Thurs: JeremyA, DevinB (debugging scripts)

This Tuesday we are enabling sshd servers on all nodes of ShadowFax, our superCluster.  We also have to generate all 25 keys for pulic key authentication!  This way, we create one common user on each node that you can log into from any node.  Once you log into one node with this userid/passwd, you can ssh to any other node using the same userid without even specifying the userid or passwd, just each ip address!  This makes it very easy to set up a master/worker cluster model (see last year's cluster blogs).  openMPI also needs this as a foundation.
I discussed how to set up public key authentication, http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=28933, on the knoppix forum way back in June 2008.  Also, we are following these notes http://dvbmonkey.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/getting-started-with-open-mpi-on-fedora about setting up openMPI on Fedora!

Happy Clustering,

calcpage@aol.com
http://mathforum.org/kb/profile.jspa?userID=32552

---

64-bit Fedora Core 11 to the rescue!

Wow, we finally did it!  We are KNOPPIX free!  Don't get me wrong, I've used KNOPPIX ever since it came out and I loved it.  However, even the forums on http://www.knoppix.net and http://knopper.net state that the KNOPPIX CD/DVD is not really meant as a linux install CD/DVD.  I used to use it a lot as if it were a Debian install CD/DVD.  KNOPPIX is a great live CD/DVD to "try linux before you buy."  BTW, our servers are still based on Slackware.

Anyway, the Fedora live CD is also a great install CD.  There's an "install to disk" icon right on the desktop when you boot the liveCD.  Just click this icon and follow the ensuing script's instructions, its very simple!  I chose the "replace existing linux" option, as I was replacing the KNOPPIX partition, so I didn't have to repartition anything.  Also, you are asked to create the root passwd and one userid + passwd.

After the CD finishes formatting the linux partition and copying itself to the hard drive, all you have to do is reboot and setup your ethernet preferences (administration/network) and edit /boot/grub/menu.lst if you are running a dual-boot environment.  You have to open a terminal and run "su" to gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst and you have to give the root passwd when you edit the ethernet preferences but its very doable.

After all that, I also had to run yum install hpjis so as to be able to use administration/printing to set up my printers.

Thanx a lot to CIS(theta), the Computer Independent Study team (JeremyA, SteveB, DevinB) who helped me install all 25 compute nodes simultaneously saving me a lot of time and hard work!  Good job guys, now we have a cool 64-bit base to build our MPI cluster on!

Happy Clustering,

calcpage@aol.com
http://mathforum.org/kb/profile.jspa?userID=32552

---

64-bit Fedora Core 11 to the rescue!

Wow, we finally did it!  We are KNOPPIX free!  Don't get me wrong, I've used KNOPPIX ever since it came out and I loved it.  However, even the forums on http://www.knoppix.net and http://knopper.net state that the KNOPPIX CD/DVD is not really meant as a linux install CD/DVD.  I used to use it a lot as if it were a Debian install CD/DVD.  KNOPPIX is a great live CD/DVD to "try linux before you buy."  BTW, our servers are still based on Slackware.

Anyway, the Fedora live CD is also a great install CD.  There's an "install to disk" icon right on the desktop when you boot the liveCD.  Just click this icon and follow the ensuing script's instructions, its very simple!  I chose the "replace existing linux" option, as I was replacing the KNOPPIX partition, so I didn't have to repartition anything.  Also, you are asked to create the root passwd and one userid + passwd.

After the CD finishes formatting the linux partition and copying itself to the hard drive, all you have to do is reboot and setup your ethernet preferences (administration/network) and edit /boot/grub/menu.lst if you are running a dual-boot environment.  You have to open a terminal and run "su" to gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst and you have to give the root passwd when you edit the ethernet preferences but its very doable.

After all that, I also had to run yum install hpjis so as to be able to use administration/printing to set up my printers.

Thanx a lot to CIS(theta), the Computer Independent Study team (JeremyA, SteveB, DevinB) who helped me install all 25 compute nodes simultaneously saving me a lot of time and hard work!  Good job guys, now we have a cool 64-bit base to build our MPI cluster on!

Happy Clustering,

calcpage@aol.com
http://mathforum.org/kb/profile.jspa?userID=32552

---

Meeting III

Today's Aim: Burn Fest!!!

Tonight's Reading: Building Parallel Programs, Chapter3

This Week's Research: Jefferson HS Supercomputing classes

Attending: JeremyA, SteveB, DevinB, ArthurD 

We burned 30 Fedora 11 liveCDs.  We used 20 PCs all at once to burn and test these CDs running K3B on the current hd installation of KNOPPIX 5.3.1 DVD.  I'm going to use these in class while we upgrade the linux partitions next meeting with the Fedora 11 64bit installation DVD.  Surf on over to http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-all for your own copy!

Happy Clustering,

calcpage@aol.com
http://mathforum.org/kb/profile.jspa?userID=32552

---

Meeting III

Today's Aim: Burn Fest!!!

Tonight's Reading: Building Parallel Programs, Chapter3

This Week's Research: Jefferson HS Supercomputing classes

Attending: JeremyA, SteveB, DevinB, ArthurD 

We burned 30 Fedora 11 liveCDs.  We used 20 PCs all at once to burn and test these CDs running K3B on the current hd installation of KNOPPIX 5.3.1 DVD.  I'm going to use these in class while we upgrade the linux partitions next meeting with the Fedora 11 64bit installation DVD.  Surf on over to http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-all for your own copy!

Happy Clustering,

calcpage@aol.com
http://mathforum.org/kb/profile.jspa?userID=32552

---

Meeting I: A new day!

Today's Aim: Hanging Art

Tonight's Reading: Building Parallel Programs, Chapter 1
This Week's Research: look up Pelican HPC site
Attending: JeremyA, SteveB, DevinB, ArthurD

We had our first meeting of the Computing Independent Study (CIS) class after school today and it went quite well.  For those of you at other schools looking for after school activities, this is a great idea!  I basically run this as a club that meets once every 2 weeks.  The students can come in on free periods any time they want to work independently however.

The students involved with CIS are primarily students who did well last year in AP Computer Science (APCS) as Juniors and want to continue learning about Computer Science.  This subset of the APCS student body is very small, maybe 2-5 students each year, as APCS is mostly for seniors at my school.  This year I only had 2 such students interested, however 2 other students who had heard about this experience asked to join, so I'm going to get permission from the Powers That Be to let them in too.

Today's meeting was a general discussion of what I had done with this course in the past and ideas for this year.   One idea was to try out Red Hat's Fedora Linux as the base OS for this year's cluster.  We used Slackware for a few years, then KNOPPIX/Debian for the last 10 years.  I think its time for a change as Fedora is based on RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) which is used by other clusters.  Then we framed some Fractal and Ray Traced digital art from last year's project and set up a display in the hallway about Shadowfax (our cluster).  

A long term goal is to emulate Pelican HPC which is a bootable CD cluster solution with our Fedora installation.  So, the homework was a reading from the Building Parallel Programs text based on Parallel Java and to visit the Pelican HPC site: 

http://www.cs.rit.edu/~ark/pj.shtml

http://idea.uab.es/mcreel/ParallelKnoppix

Happy Clustering,

calcpage@aol.com
http://mathforum.org/kb/profile.jspa?userID=32552

---

Meeting I: A new day!

Today's Aim: Hanging Art

Tonight's Reading: Building Parallel Programs, Chapter 1
This Week's Research: look up Pelican HPC site
Attending: JeremyA, SteveB, DevinB, ArthurD

We had our first meeting of the Computing Independent Study (CIS) class after school today and it went quite well.  For those of you at other schools looking for after school activities, this is a great idea!  I basically run this as a club that meets once every 2 weeks.  The students can come in on free periods any time they want to work independently however.

The students involved with CIS are primarily students who did well last year in AP Computer Science (APCS) as Juniors and want to continue learning about Computer Science.  This subset of the APCS student body is very small, maybe 2-5 students each year, as APCS is mostly for seniors at my school.  This year I only had 2 such students interested, however 2 other students who had heard about this experience asked to join, so I'm going to get permission from the Powers That Be to let them in too.

Today's meeting was a general discussion of what I had done with this course in the past and ideas for this year.   One idea was to try out Red Hat's Fedora Linux as the base OS for this year's cluster.  We used Slackware for a few years, then KNOPPIX/Debian for the last 10 years.  I think its time for a change as Fedora is based on RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) which is used by other clusters.  Then we framed some Fractal and Ray Traced digital art from last year's project and set up a display in the hallway about Shadowfax (our cluster).  

A long term goal is to emulate Pelican HPC which is a bootable CD cluster solution with our Fedora installation.  So, the homework was a reading from the Building Parallel Programs text based on Parallel Java and to visit the Pelican HPC site: 

http://www.cs.rit.edu/~ark/pj.shtml

http://idea.uab.es/mcreel/ParallelKnoppix

Happy Clustering,

calcpage@aol.com
http://mathforum.org/kb/profile.jspa?userID=32552

---