A Blog

It appears our last cluster was such a hit that once again my department at Purdue is going to do a single day, multi-hundred node cluster installation. Last year, the work went very quickly and we had the cluster racked before lunch. This year, we asked for fewer volunteers and added an extra step in the process, installing 10GigE network adapters. Hopefully that will slow things down enough so the VIPs can actually see us working.

As always, the marketing folks put together a short little clip to push the day:

The racking and stacking is pretty much just a matter of man power. Getting the software onto the systems is done using RHEL’s Anaconda and several scripts. All the magic was described by some of my coworkers in a paper for the USENIX’s LISA 2008 Conference.. A copy can be found here. It’s pretty fun stuff.

So, I have not posted much this semester, mostly because I’ve been working on either school work or a project for Supercomputing 2008. Throughout summer, I’ve been attempting to squeeze the Wave Propagation Program to run on a SiCortex. Pesky program, though not nearly as strange as some of the other science codes my friends have had to jam onto our SiCortex. (Though, I hear some other teams may or may not have had just as much trouble getting the codes to run on the platforms they were coded for!)

Have you not heard about the Cluster Challenge?! Well, there’s a good write up at HPC Wire. Of course, the MIT team is a little scary, but the rumors are they choose to port their code to something that isn’t a general purpose processor at all.. We’ll be eagerly waiting and seeing how that turns out!

As for our effort, we may be a man short, but I think we’ve got everything covered. Depending on the data sets we are give to run, this will either be a cake-walk or a challenge to the finish. Thankfully, it appears our machine is up to the task. For a lot of the details of our machines, check out this press release at Campus Technology.

If you’re in the Austin area, feel free to hit me up and see how things are progressing. If not, check out this cool game to hold you over: Rack-a-Node.