[Bioclusters] Cluster ideas/suggestions (fwd)

Nick D'Angelo ndangelo at istat.ca
Tue Jan 18 08:48:59 EST 2005


Hello David and thank you for your email.

This sounds like a very exciting little project that I am embarking on.

I am going to start next week possibly with the new distribution of biobrew
and then i will see about adding in window nodes or clients to gain some
processing power.

I am sure that I will need some guidance and I do certainly appreciate
everyone's feedback thus far.

Thanks again and what a wonderful world we live in today where we can ask
sometimes what seems to be a dumb question to an Open source community and
get some really good replies and guidance.

Nick



-----Original Message-----
From: David Hart [mailto:dhart at indiana.edu]
Sent: Monday, January 17, 2005 10:06 AM
To: Bioclusters at bioinformatics.org
Subject: Re: [Bioclusters] Cluster ideas/suggestions (fwd)



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

_______________________________________________
Bioclusters maillist  -  Bioclusters at bioinformatics.org
https://bioinformatics.org/mailman/listinfo/bioclusters


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