Installer works. Load a compute node mostly automagically (one step by hand during debugging phase, could automate this trivially) with OpenSuSE 10.2 x86_64, OFED 1.2-rc4, … sets up and configures addresses, mount points, user authentication (using NIS for the moment, anything we can script should work fine, LDAP would be preferred eventually), cluster queuing, yadda yadda yadda. The goal is to enable load/configure of any OS using PXEboot, without imaging. Some folks like imaging.

ok, not really. Linus stated some things in a post to the linux kernel mailing list. IMO he is spot on. Jonathan’s reply is what I expect from a CEO. Our experience in trying to work with Sun has been one of them pushing Solaris as the solution for everything, even when customers (and resellers in our case) spec’ed designs using Linux as the customers preferred. Solaris is not being targeted by many new ISVs or IHVs, Linux is.

Being a Michigander, I have an interest in seeing Michigan grow and thrive. This is a very nice state; there are many positive aspects to it. Apart from some union rules and the proclivity of our state government to tax, it is a good place to set up and run a business. Costs are low, burn rates are low, and relative to the rest of the country, salaries and home prices are lower.

Short post, directly related to HPC. Short version: When developing new features for a program, routine, method, whatever, it is a good idea to test it how you think you will use it. Ok. This is a dumb one. Working on our Tiburon installer. Will help with managing clusters of things. Like Linux/other compute clusters. And JackRabbits (storage clusters). Part of the installer makes use of a Perl module I wrote named DBIx::SimplePerl.

I now have a reasonable version of our Tiburon project installer working. Integrates a number of things via PXE boot. Had abandoned pxegrub in large part due to the grub team abandoning (for the most part) grub v0.9x (aka stuff that worked ok) in favor of the great big redesign and reimplementation (which doesn’t seem to be working). Don Becker, networking/clustering guru had warned of seriously borked PXE implementations in hardware, and how the interacted, badly, with TFTP.

Well, looks like it works. The relevant directory is http://downloads.scalableinformatics.com/downloads/OFED-1.2-rc2/OpenSuSE10.2/ and you need to install the kernel before you install the RPMs. Note that you will have to run mkinitrd by hand (very easy, just “mkinitrd”), and add it into /boot/grub/menu.lst . This is again, very easy to do. Also, as I am a strong proponent of yum, this is a “yumable” path [OFED-1.2-rc2-OpenSuSE10.2] Name=OFED 1.2-rc2 for OpenSuSE 10.2 baseurl=http://downloads.scalableinformatics.com/downloads/OFED-1.2-rc2/OpenSuSE10.2/ enabled=1 which should let you do a yum install ibtools and other bits.

Our JackRabbit storage unit uses lots of hard disks. The larger unit uses 48 drives in a 5U rack mount chassis. We selected and used the Seagate 750 GB NL drives for the unit, giving it a whopping 36 TB fully configured, with absolutely industry leading performance, density, etc. This is not a JackRabbit commercial, we are proud of our little L. Flavigularis though … My concern is drive failure rates.

Those with anti-Microsoft postures might think this will be a missive about Microsoft. It is not. Microsoft will not be mentioned here apart from these two sentances. The monoculture to which I refer is that of building dependencies upon particular packaging mechanisms in open source tools, or upon specific distributions. We are trying to build OFED-1.x for OpenSuSE 10.2 in order to provide Infiniband driver support to a customer’s cluster. OFED supports RPM distributions, specifically highly specific versions from RedHat and SuSE.

whoa. This one I did not see coming. It suggests that Google is serious about performance, and possibly, providing performance to its customers using tools such as PeakStream to provide acceleration. Google into acceleration. With a huge distributed supercomputer. Hmmm….. I wonder if the VCs out there can take time from the next Web 3.0 picture upload site or repackaged open source group to think about this. Nah. Overall, if you can provide high performance tools for reasonable prices (marginal cost above existing system prices), you have value.

Was finally able to get Feisty booted diskless. It is running in a VMWare server session. See the picture below. [ ](http://scalability.org/images/diskless-ubuntu-in-vmware.png) Not perfect, need to clean up the mounts a bit, and fix up some other things, but this is the right direction for us. Quite happy about this.