CIS(theta) Meeting VI (2010-2011) - pelican HPC the movie!

Aim: 

pelican HPC the movie!

Attending: 

DavidG, HerbertK, JoshG, RyanH

Reading: 

Building Parallel Programs, Chapter6

Research6: 

GigaBit Ethernet Cables

GigaBit Ethernet Routers

GigaBit Ethernet Switches

Lenovo ThinkPad X201 Tablet PC

We went a little cuckoo this week and watched all the Pelican HPC related videos we could find online!  We wanted to see that other peeps were getting Pelican to work and how they did it.  Maybe we missed something?  We started with a series of four:

Then we viewed the tutorial video from the Pelican website:



We found two more on YouTube:





OK, here's the CbN (Cluster by Night) video too.  This one is nice as it uses a CD for the Master Node and multiple CDs for the worker nodes.  So, this solution does not use PXE+openMPI+Octave, it uses ssh+openMPI+Ruby!



Well, that's all for this week.  I hope you enjoyed our movie night!  Next week, we're going to bring in our own cables, switches, routers and laptops to see if we can get Pelican to work in our lab....

Happy Clustering,

calcpage@aol.com

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

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

CIS(theta) Meeting VI (2010-2011) - pelican HPC the movie!

Aim: 

pelican HPC the movie!

Attending: 

DavidG, HerbertK, JoshG, RyanH

Reading: 

Building Parallel Programs, Chapter6

Research6: 

GigaBit Ethernet Cables

GigaBit Ethernet Routers

GigaBit Ethernet Switches

Lenovo ThinkPad X201 Tablet PC

We went a little cuckoo this week and watched all the Pelican HPC related videos we could find online!  We wanted to see that other peeps were getting Pelican to work and how they did it.  Maybe we missed something?  We started with a series of four:

Then we viewed the tutorial video from the Pelican website:



We found two more on YouTube:





OK, here's the CbN (Cluster by Night) video too.  This one is nice as it uses a CD for the Master Node and multiple CDs for the worker nodes.  So, this solution does not use PXE+openMPI+Octave, it uses ssh+openMPI+Ruby!



Well, that's all for this week.  I hope you enjoyed our movie night!  Next week, we're going to bring in our own cables, switches, routers and laptops to see if we can get Pelican to work in our lab....

Happy Clustering,

calcpage@aol.com

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

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

CIS(theta) Meeting V (2010-2011) - pelican HPC CD on Overdrive!

Aim: 
pelican HPC CD on Overdrive!

Attending: 
DavidG, HerbertK, JayW, JoshG, RyanH

Reading: 
Building Parallel Programs, Chapter5

Research5: 
pelican HPC website
http://idea.uab.es/mcreel/ParallelKnoppix
pelican HPC tutorial
http://pareto.uab.es/mcreel/PelicanHPC/Tutorial/PelicanTutorial.html
pelican HPC forum
http://pelicanhpc.788819.n4.nabble.com
pelican HPC article
http://www.linux-magazine.com/w3/issue/103/030-035_pelicanHPC.pdf
pelican HPC based
http://birg1.fbb.utm.my/birghpc
pelican HPC based
http://kestrelhpc.sourceforge.net
pelican HPC like
http://www.ehu.es/AC/ABC.htm
pelican HPC like
http://www.dirigibleflightcraft.com/index.html




This week we went into pelicanHPC overdrive!  pelicanHPC was developed by Michael Creel at the University of Barcelona for his research in Econometrics using Octave and MPI.  We downloaded the ISO and burned one CD.  We then booted one of our 64bit dualcore AMD Athlons to try out pelicanHPC.  We booted the remaining 24 PCs (total of 50 2GHz cores) from that CD via PXE or netboot.  The video above follows the tutorial on the pelicanHPC website.  Take a look at the BIRG website with a version for Bioinformatics and protein folding.  It also has a tutorial.  Kestrel looks interesting too but it has to be installed on a hard drive and I don't think I want to give up the Ubuntu desktop we use in class during the day.  Our clustering experiments will be conducted after hours.  Take a look at CLuster By Night which uses ssh instead of PXE and Ruby instead of C++ for MPI jobs!



We ran into a bit of a SNAFU, however, as the client PCs got stuck somewhere in the middle of the boot process via PXE (so PXE boot works at least).  So, I dragged out a CrossOver Ethernet cable (http://www.littlewhitedog.com/content-8.html) I had spliced together ahead of time for just such an eventuality.  



This way we can fool 2 PCs (4 cores on the Athlons or 8 cores on the Xeons) into "thinking" they were still on an isolated LAN (PXE boot only works over Ethernet on a network with no other DHCP servers). 

We attached the Ethernet cards on eth1 (we also have eth0 for a public Windows LAN) that we usually use for the private Linux LAN, but ran into the same problem!




We also discussed using pelicanHPC or parallel Java "out of the box."  In other words these clustering solutions work fine on multicore PCs, the problem is networking more than one node.  We should have no problem making pelican or PJ use 1 or 2 cores on one of our AMD Athlons and 1, 2 or 4 cores on one of our Intel Xeons!


Well, "That's All Folks," for this meeting. We'll tackle the new server again next meeting in 2 weeks. Check our new Facebook Group, CIS(theta), for our next event!  BTW, this 1 hour meeting every 2 weeks is mandatory.  

Happy Clustering,

calcpage@aol.com
http://shop.ebay.com/items/_ti_calculator_active

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

CIS(theta) Meeting V (2010-2011) - pelican HPC CD on Overdrive!

Aim: 
pelican HPC CD on Overdrive!

Attending: 
DavidG, HerbertK, JayW, JoshG, RyanH

Reading: 
Building Parallel Programs, Chapter5

Research5: 
pelican HPC website
http://idea.uab.es/mcreel/ParallelKnoppix
pelican HPC tutorial
http://pareto.uab.es/mcreel/PelicanHPC/Tutorial/PelicanTutorial.html
pelican HPC forum
http://pelicanhpc.788819.n4.nabble.com
pelican HPC article
http://www.linux-magazine.com/w3/issue/103/030-035_pelicanHPC.pdf
pelican HPC based
http://birg1.fbb.utm.my/birghpc
pelican HPC based
http://kestrelhpc.sourceforge.net
pelican HPC like
http://www.ehu.es/AC/ABC.htm
pelican HPC like
http://www.dirigibleflightcraft.com/index.html




This week we went into pelicanHPC overdrive!  pelicanHPC was developed by Michael Creel at the University of Barcelona for his research in Econometrics using Octave and MPI.  We downloaded the ISO and burned one CD.  We then booted one of our 64bit dualcore AMD Athlons to try out pelicanHPC.  We booted the remaining 24 PCs (total of 50 2GHz cores) from that CD via PXE or netboot.  The video above follows the tutorial on the pelicanHPC website.  Take a look at the BIRG website with a version for Bioinformatics and protein folding.  It also has a tutorial.  Kestrel looks interesting too but it has to be installed on a hard drive and I don't think I want to give up the Ubuntu desktop we use in class during the day.  Our clustering experiments will be conducted after hours.  Take a look at CLuster By Night which uses ssh instead of PXE and Ruby instead of C++ for MPI jobs!



We ran into a bit of a SNAFU, however, as the client PCs got stuck somewhere in the middle of the boot process via PXE (so PXE boot works at least).  So, I dragged out a CrossOver Ethernet cable (http://www.littlewhitedog.com/content-8.html) I had spliced together ahead of time for just such an eventuality.  



This way we can fool 2 PCs (4 cores on the Athlons or 8 cores on the Xeons) into "thinking" they were still on an isolated LAN (PXE boot only works over Ethernet on a network with no other DHCP servers). 

We attached the Ethernet cards on eth1 (we also have eth0 for a public Windows LAN) that we usually use for the private Linux LAN, but ran into the same problem!




We also discussed using pelicanHPC or parallel Java "out of the box."  In other words these clustering solutions work fine on multicore PCs, the problem is networking more than one node.  We should have no problem making pelican or PJ use 1 or 2 cores on one of our AMD Athlons and 1, 2 or 4 cores on one of our Intel Xeons!


Well, "That's All Folks," for this meeting. We'll tackle the new server again next meeting in 2 weeks. Check our new Facebook Group, CIS(theta), for our next event!  BTW, this 1 hour meeting every 2 weeks is mandatory.  

Happy Clustering,

calcpage@aol.com
http://shop.ebay.com/items/_ti_calculator_active

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