Meeting II

Today's Aim: Boot up an MPI cluster using the Pelican HPC 64-bit bootable CD from the University of Barcelona on the Master Node and PXE booting the Worker Nodes

Tonight's Reading: Building Parallel Programs, Chapter 2

This Week's Research: look up info on GIMPS, PovRay and Fractals

Attending: JeremyA, SteveB, DevinB, ArthurD 

We had a problem with conflicting DHCP servers on our LAN when setting up Pelican HPC, even though the Linux LAN is supposed to be isolated.  I was surprised as I had this working last June!  We'll try again next meeting.  We are also looking into downloading and buring the Red Hat Fedora 11 64-bit installation DVD to reinstall the whole room.  Eventually, we'll try to emulate the MPI+MPITB+Octave cluster a la Pelican HPC.  Maybe we can install Sage from the University of Washington and use dSage?  What about the proprietary version of MOSIX, now that openMOSIX is dead, from the University of Israel?

Happy Clustering,

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

---

Meeting II

Today's Aim: Boot up an MPI cluster using the Pelican HPC 64-bit bootable CD from the University of Barcelona on the Master Node and PXE booting the Worker Nodes

Tonight's Reading: Building Parallel Programs, Chapter 2

This Week's Research: look up info on GIMPS, PovRay and Fractals

Attending: JeremyA, SteveB, DevinB, ArthurD 

We had a problem with conflicting DHCP servers on our LAN when setting up Pelican HPC, even though the Linux LAN is supposed to be isolated.  I was surprised as I had this working last June!  We'll try again next meeting.  We are also looking into downloading and buring the Red Hat Fedora 11 64-bit installation DVD to reinstall the whole room.  Eventually, we'll try to emulate the MPI+MPITB+Octave cluster a la Pelican HPC.  Maybe we can install Sage from the University of Washington and use dSage?  What about the proprietary version of MOSIX, now that openMOSIX is dead, from the University of Israel?

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

---