Date: Thu, 07 Feb 2002 14:06:17 -0800 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Matt Wilbur <matt@efs.org> Cc: advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Re: diskless freebsd cluster Message-ID: <3C62FA59.C925EB5E@mindspring.com> References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0202070937520.4970-100000@sargon.photon.com>
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Matt, if we could get someone interested in interviewing you, and taking pictures, etc. (of if you could take them) with a digital camera, this would make an excellent basis for an article in Daemon News! The best bet, from my perspective, is if you wrote the thing yourself, and/or press-released it. It's at least press-release worthy, if the client is happy with it. Personally, I really enjoy reading "workhorse" articles... Brett Glass, are you listening? I personally have too many irons in the fire right now, but I might be able to get to it near the end of this month or the start of next, if no one else is willing to grab it up immediately (hint hint). -- Terry Matt Wilbur wrote: > > Hi all, > > I just wanted to say, to the entire FreeBSD team, especially everyone > involved with pxe support, rc.diskless[1,2], mfs, and gigabit nic support, > THANKS! You ROCK! > > I just got a 16 node diskless cluster of 1.4GHz Athlons (dual 1GHz p3 > server) up and running 4.5-RELEASE, and it was SO much easier than it used > to be.. > > The cluster has two "primary" uses, one is to do high volume number > crunching, the other is for a parallelized port of one of our > toolkits for a particular customer, who is insisting on a Scyld Linux > "beowulf". The original plan was to port our crunching codes from FreeBSD > to Linux (sigh), but since it took about a day to build a second system > disk running FreeBSD (and a port would've taken at least a week or two), > that is far more cost effective in the short. Hopefully I can build a > mini scyld cluster for development only and we can stick with FreeBSD.. > > Why diskless? We're doing diskless because the codes we're currently > using are CPU intensive, with little file i/o, and because the lab it's > operating in has restricted access, its far easier to operate diskless for > media accounting reasons, especially if/when N goes from 16 to say, > 64..or if we want to wheel the rack out of the lab and operate > "outside". I'm getting 97% user CPU on all nodes when I hammer the system > with runs, I can live with that.. The network is 100baseT to the client > nodes, 1000baseSX server->switch. > > For what it's worth, the crunching used to happen on Origin 200s. Of two > primary codes we run, code A would take about the same time on freebsd on > a p3-1GHz as it did on a 270MHz r12000. Code B ran three times faster > on a p3-1GHz than on the 270MHz r12k. Our cost savings are phenomenal > using commodity hardware and a great OS. > > If anyone would find the setup/configuration of interest I can document > how I set it up and throw it up somewhere for your perusal.. > > again, THANK YOU! > Matt Wilbur > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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