[Bioclusters] Cluster ideas/suggestions (fwd)

[David Hart]

We found that nearly 50% of the cycles of our centrally-
managed desktop machines were going unused. We can scavenge
nearly all of them.

There are different ways to do this. It may be simplest
to automatically reboot to Linux every evening and then
return to Windows in the morning.

Our situation [strict priority of interactive use, which
continues throughout the day and night] prevented that
approach, so we use Condor to track available machines,
and an MPI-workalike library that we wrote, Simple Message
Brokering Library [http://smbl.sourceforge.net/]. SMBL
relies upon a server to track which jobs are on which
machines. Our Condor and SMBL [and SAMBA and Apache]
servers run Linux, the workers run Windows.

Access is limited to kerberos-authenticated users through
a web portal [another feature of our situation -- constant
security attacks -- means that we can't throw it open to
user-supplied code]. We currently provide parallel versions
of BLAST, MEME, and fastDNAml.

David Hart
Manager, High Performance Computing Support
http://www.indiana.edu/~rac/hpc/
812-855-2632


> From: "Nick D'Angelo" <ndangelo at istat.ca>
> Date: January 13, 2005 9:34:14 AM EST
> To: "'Bioclusters at bioinformatics.org'" <Bioclusters at bioinformatics.org>
> Cc: Subject: [Bioclusters] Cluster ideas/suggestions
> Reply-To: "Clustering,  compute farming & distributed computing in
> life science informatics" <bioclusters at bioinformatics.org>
>
> In speaking to our R and D managers, they posed a good question.
>
> What about their desktop machines (relatively New Dell PCs), have them
> automatically shutdown and reboot, say at 8:00 pm and then join the
> cluster until 05:00 am.
>
> Then at 5:00 am, initiate another reboot that will present the Windows
> Login for the 'normal business day'.
>
> This would make great use of the hundreds of computers that are mostly
> sitting idle during the off hours 'normal business day'.
>
> Thoughts, suggestions always appreciated, thanks.
>
> Nick
>
> In case you need to know,  I am likely going to install the BioBrew
> v3.x which has just been pre-leased in Beta I believe.
> _______________________________________________
> Bioclusters maillist  -  Bioclusters at bioinformatics.org
> https://bioinformatics.org/mailman/listinfo/bioclusters

---
David Hart
Manager, High Performance Computing Support
http://www.indiana.edu/~rac/hpc/
812-855-2632