5 ms·
But does anyone remember the Beowulf trope(1) from Slashdot? Am I a greybeard now? (1) https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/01/07/14/0748215/can-you-imagine-a-b
by xattt 4y ago
But does anyone remember the Beowulf trope(1) from Slashdot? Am I a greybeard now?
(1) https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/01/07/14/0748215/can-you-imagine-a-beowulf-cluster-of-these https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/01/07/14/0748215/can-you...
- pjmlp 4y agoI do. And cool research OSes that did process migration.
- nine_k 4y agoAh, Plan 9.
- zozbot234 4y agoI'm not sure that Plan 9 does process migration out of the box. It does have complete "containerization" by default, i.e. user-controlled namespacing of all OS resources - so snapshotting and migration could be a feasible addition to it. Distributed shared memory is another intriguing possibility, particularly since large address spaces are now basically ubiquitous. It would allow users to seamlessly extend multi-threaded workloads to run on a cluster; the OS would essentially have to implement memory-coherence protocols over the network.
- nine_k 4y agoIf not Plan 9, then likely Inferno. (A pretty different system, of course.)
- wiredfool 4y agoAnd God help us, OS2/Warp.
- pjmlp 4y agoWith much better tooling for OO ABI than COM/WinRT will ever get (SOM).
- infinite8s 4y agoIt's too bad Apple never bought Gerry Popek's LOCUS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOCUS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOCUS), which could do process migration between heterogeneous hardware!
- Quequau 4y agoI do but in all fairness, I have an entirely grey beard.
- KingOfCoders 4y agoGrey! Mine is white.
- neilv 4y agoTo go along with "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!", don't forget "Take my money!"
- Koshkin 4y agoYou can get off my lawn now.
- edoloughlin 4y agoI do and you are. I’m also imagining one covered in hot grits…
- pbronez 4y agoNew to me - found the source article in the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20010715201416/http://www.scientificamerican.com/2001/0801issue/0801hargrove.html https://web.archive.org/web/20010715201416/http://www.scient...
- pbronez 4y agoFound the definition: Sterling and his Goddard colleague Donald J. Becker connected 16 PCs, each containing an Intel 486 microprocessor, using Linux and a standard Ethernet network. For scientific applications, the PC cluster delivered sustained performance of 70 megaflops--that is, 70 million floating-point operations per second. Though modest by today's standards, this speed was not much lower than that of some smaller commercial supercomputers available at the time. And the cluster was built for only $40,000, or about one tenth the price of a comparable commercial machine in 1994. NASA researchers named their cluster Beowulf, after the lean, mean hero of medieval legend who defeated the giant monster Grendel by ripping off one of the creature's arms. Since then, the name has been widely adopted to refer to any low-cost cluster constructed from commercially available PCs.
- iamflimflam1 4y agoBut does it run Doom?
- faichai 4y agoNatalie Portman says yes, and instructs you to put some hot grits down your pants.
- trollied 4y agoDon't forget the Hot Grits & Natalie Portman.
- pdpi 4y agoBeowulf clusters were those lame things that didn’t have wireless, and had less space than a nomad, right?
- wrldos 4y agoIt remember building a 4 node Beowulf cluster out of discarded compaq desktops and then having no idea what to do with it.
- mkj 4y ago75mhz, yeah! Stacked on top of each other! With 10mbit ethernet! I think we got OpenMosix going even. But then 5 years later I was working on them for a living in HPC, but they were no longer called Beowulf Clusters then.
- red-iron-pine 4y agoDid kinda the same thing but with Raspberry Pis. Neat, a cluster of r-pi's... now what?
- ipsin 4y agoIf you want to continue the chain of specific goals in service of no specific purpose: run Kubernetes on it.
- Sebb767 4y agoThen add ArgoCD for deployment and istio for a service mesh! While you are at it, also setup Longhorn for storage. With that solved, you might as well start hosting Gitea and DroneCI on the cluster, plus an extra helm- and docker repo for good measure. And in no time you will have a full modern CI/CD setup to do nothing but updates on! :-) Seriously, though, you will learn a lot of things in the process and get a bottom up view of current stacks, which is definitely helpful.
- wrldos 4y agoI did this. I am still dead inside. Thank goodness all my production shit has a managed control plane and network.
- worthless-trash 4y ago
- flyinghamster 4y agoYou and me both. The funny thing is, I wound up writing a program that would benefit from clustering, and felt my way around setting up MPICH on my zoo. I laughed out loud when I realized that, after all these years, I'd built an impromptu Beowulf cluster, even though the machines are scattered around the house. Installing MPICH from source instead of from your distribution is best if you can't have all your cluster members running the same version of the same distro and/or have multiple architectures to contend with. But it takes forever to compile, even on a fast machine.
- ilyt 4y agowell since you already have a cluster you could distcc the compilation. I remember doing that on a bunch of machines when we were building gentoo
- dredmorbius 4y agoThat's more a COW, than a (Beo)wulf, no? <https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/high-performance-linux/0596005709/ch01.html https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/high-performance-linux/...> A cluster of workstations (COW) is usually opportunistic exploiting existing systems, and lower density than a dedicated (usually rack-based or datacentre-based) cluster. In practice, COWs usually turn out to be not especially useful, though there are exceptions.
- lemper 4y agoyeah, wanted to replicate something like that by proposing a hardware vendor who visited my uni. decades ago. didn't go nowhere because i was intimidated by the red-tapes.
- mometsi 4y agoI like user big.ears' speculation on what someone could possibly do with that much parallel compute: I don't think there's any theoretical reason someone couldn't build a fairly realistic highly-complex "brain" using, say, 100,000,000 simplified neural units (I've heard of a guy in Japan who is doing such a thing), but I don't really know what it would do, or if it would teach us anything that is interesting.
- b33j0r 4y agoSure do! It is interesting that these technologies evolve more slowly than it seems, sometimes. On the graybearding of the cohort, here’s a weird one to me. These days, I mention slashdot and get more of a response from peers than mentioning digg! In 2005, I totally thought digg would be around forever as the slashdot successor, but it’s almost like it never happened (to software professionals… er, graybeards)
- bradleyy 4y agoSo, I once met a guy named Don. We were hanging out in the garage of a mutual friend, chatting. Got to the "what do you do" section of the conversation, and he says he works in massively parallel stuff at XYZ corp. Something something, GPUs. I make the obvious "can you make a Beowulf cluster?" joke, to which he responds (after a pregnant pause), "you... do know who I am?" Yep. Donald Becker. A slightly awkward moment, I'll cherish forever.
- rfrey 4y agoEw. "Do you have any idea who I am?" is never a good look.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]