10 Years of Beowulf Clustering 210
Quirk writes "Wired News has a blurb celebrating the 10th birthday of the Beowulf cluster. Attendees recalled the initial fear and loathing the Beowulf project had to overcome. The Beowulf project takes its name from an epic poem penned circa 1000 A.D."
Strange... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Strange... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Strange... (Score:2)
Re:Strange... (Score:1, Offtopic)
Sounds better than: (Score:2)
Or Imagine a Mother of Grendel cluster of these....
It seems like a good time.., (Score:2, Funny)
Couldn't resist.
Next up the 10th aniversary of the
1. xxx
2. ?
3. PROFIT!
model of buisness.
You mean... (Score:1)
Re:You mean... (Score:1)
Re:It seems like a good time.., (Score:1)
Re:It seems like a good time.., (Score:1)
Thats December 16th 2008, people!
Lets start planning the party now!
Dug
Re:It seems like a good time.., (Score:2)
Re:It seems like a good time.., (Score:1)
Re:It seems like a good time.., (Score:2)
Don't forget the *sauce*!
Oh Lord.. (Score:4, Funny)
I'm gonna get modded down for this, but... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I'm gonna get modded down for this, but... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I'm gonna get modded down for this, but... (Score:3, Funny)
(actually, with the increasing sophistication of implanted prosthetics like pacemakers and such... someday it very well might. "root@heart# echo 60 > /proc/sys/heart/bpm" )
Imagine /. Without Beowulf (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm somewhat sorry.
Now go and cluster something.
Finally!! (Score:2, Insightful)
I wonder, can we beowolf custer a beowulf cluster?!
Re:Finally!! (Score:5, Interesting)
You might be interested in grid computing, in which a group of academics with heads too big for their common good decide not to build one fucking huge computer in one place, but instead spend all their grant money on fiber transceivers and other equipment that can transfer at a few dozen GBit between far less powerful clusters. Whenever you see a grid built with modern equipment (rather than one that strings together a few older machines), it means the people involved at some level were playing politics so that they could 'me too' their department into owning a piece of it.
I once watched some of this process in motion, which helped to smack down a far more sensical and quite impressive machine proposal, and found the whole thing to be entirely retarded.
Re:Finally!! (Score:3, Insightful)
you seem to have overlooked the fact that these people are indeed academics... the people who push boundaries and bring about new ways of doing things. grid computing isn't working now, but when the technology is in place for it, it will be revolutionary. these kind of ideas don't work first time round, and certainly don't fix themselves overnight.
your ignorance to the sheer amount of informatio
Here's your BIG chance! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Here's your BIG chance! (Score:3, Funny)
At Last (Score:5, Funny)
Re:At Last (Score:5, Funny)
Re:At Last (Score:5, Funny)
Re:At Last (Score:2, Funny)
Yeah, but... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Yeah, but... (Score:1)
Re:Yeah, but... (Score:2)
p
Sad (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Sad (Score:4, Insightful)
*I may be giving "most people" too much credit, of course.
Re:Sad (Score:2)
Re:Sad (Score:2)
But just imagine what you could do with a beowulf cluster of ignorant slashdot readers....
Re:Sad (Score:2)
Nothing?
Re:Sad (Score:2)
Nothing?"
But damned if we wouldnt get it done fast.
Reminds me of the linus quote about executing infinite loops faster than other operating systems
Re:Sad (Score:1)
Re:Sad (Score:2)
This? [slashdot.org]
Re:Sad (Score:4, Informative)
Beowulf aims at minimizing computation time. One option for reducing the processing time of a program is to divide it into independent sub-tasks that can be processed by different CPUs. When the results of these sub-tasks are available, they can be returned to one of the processors for final processing. It is possible to use Ethernet transfers to extend this strategy across multiple computers. This is how Beowulf works: divide programs into many parts that are executed by many CPUs all of which transfer their data and instructions via Ethernet.
Imagine a.... (Score:4, Funny)
Seriously though, the linked article goes into a lot of detail about what a beowulf cluster is.
Re:Sad (Score:2)
I have yet to see anyone actualy using Beowulf.
Re:Sad (Score:2)
About Old English literature? You bet, at least a substantial number of them are. And you'll find lit students who know all about Hrunting and Grendel's Mom, but are equally clueless about system clustering.
An aside to Lord-of-the-Rings-loving geeks: Tolkein was a scholar of Beowulf, and drew substantial inspiration from it. It isn't as easy a read as Tolkein (even in a
Re:Sad (Score:2)
You're new here, aren't you?
reminds me of my first cluster project... (Score:5, Interesting)
I didn't know network programming, so all communication was through read/writing a few networked control files. One acted as a semaphore - if you had sucessfully written your computer ID to it, you could modify the main to-do-list file. One specialized computer was assigned the task of copying the finshed files onto my new 810MB laptop's hard drive; otherwise the file server didn't have enough space for all the
It was a fun project & I've got it included on my resume. Today it sounds kindof trivial, so I've had to explain that general-purpose clustering tools weren't available then. I guess Beouwulf beat me to it by a year (and a zillion-fold on capability), so I was wrong. Information travelled so much slower those days...
Re:reminds me of my first cluster project... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure when it was written, but DQS (the distributed queueing system) was around in 1996, and I don't believe it was especially new then. this document [216.239.41.104] alleges that the whole clustering thing began at NASA in 1994. Apparently FSU developed DQS [fsu.edu] starting in 1992 [fsu.edu] but I don't know when the first release was.
I used to work for a company called silicon engineering in scotts valley, ca - formerly sequoia semiconductor and last I heard they were part of creative labs called creative silicon or something. We used DQS to schedule jobs for IC simulation for testing.
Of course, DQS doesn't work on DOS, it's a Unix-type program. For anything that can be batched (like rendering frames in POVray) it can be amazingly slick and it takes relatively little configuration. It has a keen little program that watches when your system is idle and signals the queue master to feed it jobs, which is an X client. Using DQS and the berkeley automounter it was possible to easily submit jobs and not care where they ran, for instance we had the paths set up such that the same commands worked on SunOS4 and SunOS5 so verilog was always in the same place, et cetera.
DQS also has a parallel make utility, which I never used, because I hardly ever compiled anything. :)
Re:reminds me of my first cluster project... (Score:2)
They must be talking about Beowulf in specific; clustering in general definitely goes back further than that. For example, I know that DEC was clustering Vaxen back in the 1980's. (I remember hearing in those days that CompuServe operated on a Vax cluster.)
in soviet russia... (Score:1, Funny)
Beowulf - the name (Score:5, Informative)
The Beowulf poem is the oldest known epic in the Anglo-Saxon language (that's like, early english). It's about the life of a king of the "Geats" called Beowulf. It starts off as him as a young rash figher and follows through to his death after fighting a dragon.
Damn great story - there's probably loads of online texts (like this one? [everypoet.com]). The only surviving manuscript (possibly the only one ever written) is in the British Library. You can go there and see it.
Why? (Score:2)
Why am I not surprised that you somehow managed to include "Geatse" reference in your Beowulf cluster of those explanation? Don't even get me started o
Best Beowulf plot summary (Score:2)
In fact, I like it so much I am going to plead fair use and extract it.
Re:Beowulf - the name (Score:3, Funny)
LO, praise of the prowess of moderators of troll.. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:LO, praise of the prowess of moderators of trol (Score:2)
Just think... (Score:4, Funny)
Alternate Source for name "Beowulf" (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Alternate Source for name "Beowulf" (Score:2)
For anyone who doesn't know the original story, this is pleasingly ironic. Beowulf defeated the monster Grendel, ripped its arm off and hung it up as a trophy. Grendel goes home and dies of his injuries, and his mother promptly goes off to hunt d
"Joke" posts (Score:4, Funny)
Ok...huh? (Score:2)
Attendees of what, exactly? The blurb? I've never attended a blurb. Can you build a beowulf of them?? Sigh. -buf
Re:Ok...huh? (Score:2)
Re:Ok...huh? (Score:2)
-buf
And 5 1/2 years of jokes (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:And 5 1/2 years of jokes (Score:3, Informative)
Where were *you* on 25 February 1999?
p
Re:And 5 1/2 years of jokes (Score:2)
Re:And 5 1/2 years of jokes (Score:2)
Actually, it's likely that comment was probably posted before the rating system came about, seeing as all the other comments on the story are also Score 1.
And it is SCO too! (Score:2)
I wonder if they are going to claim it as their IP, and sue thousands of
Beowulf (Score:3, Informative)
Ok, well, that's nice BUT (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Ok, well, that's nice BUT (Score:2, Troll)
Sure. The
I tried... (Score:1)
hmm, haven't played Diablo 2 in awhile...
Imagine a Beowulf cluster ... in Japan (Score:1, Troll)
-russ
Happy Birthday (Score:1, Offtopic)
epic versus clustering (Score:5, Insightful)
Danny.
Of course not (Score:2)
The Year? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The Year? (Score:2)
"AD - abbrev. - Anno Domini (placed after a date, indicating that it comes the specified number of years after the traditional date of Christ's birth).
ORIGIN L. 'in the year of the Lord'."
(source: Oxford Dictionary, Tenth Edition; emphasis added)
BC is also placed after a date.
Re:The Year? (Score:2)
Well yeah, but can you honestly ignore this historic document [wikipedia.org]?
If Zero Wing says it, it must be true...
Re:The Year? (Score:2)
"Anno Domini 2004" ("in the Year of the Lord 2004") tells you that we're talking about the 2004th year of Jesus' Lordship. "2004 in the Year of the Lord" i
Re:The Year? (Score:2)
(Source: Wikipedia [wikipedia.org])
There's a reason why the Oxford Dictionary calls itself "the foremost authority on current English"
No idea why the formal usage of AD wasn't included, though.
Wow (Score:4, Funny)
Imagine (Score:5, Funny)
Of 64 G5s
Or 128 Opterons
Between them only CAT5
Imagine all the boxen
Benching Quake FPS...
Imagine no shared memory
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to spinlock or thrash for
No cache coherence too
Imagine all the boxen
Crunching local tasks...
Imagine there's no mainframes
I wonder if you can
No need for Crays or S/390s
A cluster loosely bound
Imagine all the boxen
Sharing all the LAN...
You may say that I'm a uniprocessor
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And we'll simulate nukes as one
Re:Imagine (Score:1)
Terriffic! and whats more impressive (at least according to Google) original!!! when I next have mod points I'll track down one of your posts and mod it up!.
Cheap supercomputing and blade servers. (Score:2)
Imagine clustering hundreds to thousands of identical computers together to do heavy-duty computational work at a cost far below that of a dedicated supercomputer--that's what Beowulf clustering has made possible. Why do you think a lot of biotech companies are using large-scale Beowulf cluster setups to do DNA simulation?
Also, it has created a market for rack-mounted small server machines called blade servers where you can pu
contemporary epic poem (Score:1, Informative)
Check it out, yo.
http://www.legends.dm.net/paladins/cid.html
ht
Question (Score:3, Interesting)
Can anyone who was around at the time shed some light on this?
Re:Question (Score:5, Interesting)
1. commodity hardware had some serious problems back then compared to today (so did big iron but that was always hush-hush and part of the mystique of running on big iron), and the software was a lot rougher, did less compared to the commercial Unixes, etc.
2. Running on big iron was, well, not only accepted, but sexy, it was the thing to do. to be able to say you are running your code on the new super fast SGI, Intel or IBM is much more uber (at the time anyway) than to say yeah we ran it on a bunch of desktop PCs in a cluster. Took awhile for the non-computer tinkerer scientists to accept the whole thing.
3. Even today, some jobs run better on a shared memory big iron machine than parallelized out on a
cluster using message passing. That was true then, also.
4. Scientists don't always think of a very scalable (i.e. increasingly faster potentially) thing like a cluster as good. Gone are the days where you can start a run and disappear to go mountain climbing or sailing for two weeks. At best a long simulation (or portion thereof) buys you a long weekend. The faster the number-crunching goes the more work you have to do, the more results are expected faster, etc, etc. A vicious circle really. If this concept shocks you, pretend grants, academia and all of it has no politics, only wonderful breakneck pursuit of fact and conquering new horizons...
That's just my take. Oh yeah, and highly unlikely to get funding or donations back then from the big companies of equipment to build a cheap alternative to their flagship HPC products... They didn't exactly encourage that sort of thing.
So what do we do in another two years? (Score:2)
I'm kinda off-base here, aren't?
Beowulf in L33t/aolspeak.. (Score:4, Funny)
I did it out of boredom more than anything else a long time back..
Its only the first three verses' however, I wasn't insane enough to do the whole thing.
D00d u no Cl4n Danish?
Cpl 98, 99
Th3y b l33t
[danish]Shield < [danish]sheaf
pwnd in Q3 & C$
Romero was like "D00d??! WTF?"
Bcase he w4z working solo.
He wez top of teh ladder
and teh Chatroom was like
"D00d??! WTF?"
He pwnz
[danish]shield N3\/\/ a n00b
T0ok nOOb to clan danish
n00b was fr0n CowboyNeil
k3pt the Cl4n as 1
M4de them > l33t
[danish]grain w4a his 'nic
He was l33t.
in the CPL
4ll n00bs shuld l34rn
Spread the lewt
when u are a noob
so wh3n ur 19
teh clan wi1l still restecpt U
wh3n j00 at w4r
a man is l33t
if he is k00l
on any of teh servers(xsept teh telstra 1s)
[danish]shield was pwnd after his 19th
w3nt to uni stoned but still with l33t
teh clan danish gave him pr0n
which was sw33t
1n his gargae sat
a l33t machin3
old-school but built 4 teh road
There [danish]shield slept
next 2 teh handbrake
surrounded by teh pr0n
russ4n, german and teh japanes
teh Cl4n watched teh car leave
a shitbox it was
filled with the lewt
and teh goatse mails and gifs
4 teh long wait till uni
he was without a gfx card
he w4s liek a n00b
wh3n he left teh clan
A l4mer n00b
teh clan put a bumper sticker on his c4r
Goatse it procle.. proclaine... said.
teh clan l3t him le4ve
a|\|D 3 teh uni he went
teh most l33t in teh clan
don't no what uni is liek
I feel unclean now.
Wow (Score:3, Funny)
And now, "Beowulf" is a term synonymous with the most downmodded
You've come a long way, baby.
OpenMosix? (Score:2)
Re:Obligatory comment (Score:2)
Oh wait...
Re:Obligatory comment (Score:3, Funny)
Gr... I've already done one, I feel dirty...
Seriously though (and offtopic, but more intelligent), anyone ever noticed that only geeks have this bad penchant for inside jokes? BAD inside jokes. REALLY bad... etc... Why is this, are us geeks to preocupied to come up with new jokes? And the sad thing is that everyonce in awhile I still giggle at them, even if I can see the "In soviet russia, a beowulf clusters you (with hot grits and natalie
Re:Obligatory comment (Score:2)
with natalie portman and hot grits...
in soviet russia all of us are belong to yo' momma!
I'm really quite done.
really.
Re:If I was going to post a LINUX STORY... (Score:2)
Re:If I was going to post a LINUX STORY... (Score:1)
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/02/1
it was on the front page on Monday August 2nd. at least when you troll make sure it wasn't actually on the front page?
Re:If I was going to post a LINUX STORY... (Score:2, Funny)
Imagine a beowulf cluster of all the computers of people that read slashdot everyday, damn, you could hack the planet with that thing in 0.832595 seconds.
Re:Imagine (Score:1)
Re:Imagine (Score:1, Redundant)
Re:Imagine (Score:2)
Re:Imagine (Score:2)
Yeah, but it's a Grendel's Mother cluster that I'd be more afraid of. And as everyone knows, a Dragon cluster will whup a Beowulf cluster's butt.
Re:What's the biggest beowulf cluster? (Score:2)