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Software

openMosix Is Shutting Down 252

Posted by kdawson from the who-needs-clusters-anyway dept.
jd writes "Despite having one of the largest user-bases of any clustering system for Linux, openMosix is to be shut down. Top developers have left and they lack the means or motivation to continue. Their official claim of multicore CPUs making clustering redundant is somewhere between highly improbable and totally absurd, as has been pointed out elsewhere. Why is this shutdown so important? Well, from a technical standpoint, the open-source bproc (the Beowulf process migration module) is ancient, MOSIX is very hard to obtain unless you're a student, and kerrighd is (as yet) immature. From a user standpoint, openMosix is the mainstay of the Open Source clustering world and has by far the best management tools of any. The ability of this project to continue will likely have a major impact on the future of Open Source in the high-end markets — if the best of the best couldn't survive, people will be more careful about anything less."

100 Gbps Via Ethernet 160

Posted by kdawson from the don't-bother-torrenting dept.
Doc Ruby writes, "As reported at GigaOM, 'Infinera has bonded 10 parallel 10 Gb/s channels into one logical flow while maintaining packet ordering at the receiver,' bridging 100-Gbps ethernet over 10 10-Gbps optical WAN links. Infinera's press release is here. Further from GigaOM: 'The experimental system was set up between Tampa, Florida and Houston, Texas, and back again. A 100 GbE signal was spliced into ten 10 Gb/s streams using an Infinera-proposed specification for 100GbE across multiple links. The splicing of the signal is based on a packet-reordering algorithm developed at [UC] Santa Cruz. This algorithm preserves packet order even as individual flows are striped across multiple wavelengths.' We're all going to want our share of these 100Gbps networks. The current network retailers, mainly cable and DSL dealers, still haven't brought even 10Mbps to most homes, though they're now bringing fiber to the premises to some rich/lucky customers. Are they laying fiber that will bring them to Tbps, or will that stuff clog the way to getting these speeds ourselves?" Rumors say that what runs over Verizon's FiOS is ATM, to support their aspirations for triple-play.

PS3 Problems Cause Sony Stocks to Slide 238

Posted by Zonk from the sad-day-for-stocks dept.
eldavojohn writes "Gamespot has an article describing PS3s operating erratically at conference demonstrations.' In its defense, Sony said the PS3 failures were caused by unusually high temperatures created by having many of the next-gen consoles operating in close proximity to each other. 'It's not a problem with the PlayStation 3 unit itself,' Sony spokeswoman Nanako Kato told the AP. 'For a normal player at home, there shouldn't be any problem.' As a result, Sony's stock slid 2.75%. I guess they should have thought first before releasing five times the number of kiosks as they did with the PS2 — they're causing each other to overheat. There goes my PS3 beowulf cluster idea!" Update: 10/04 20:40 GMT by Z : anti-human 1 wrote in to mention a GamesIndustry.biz article, with a flat denial of overheating issues from Sony. "As could be seen on the TGS floor by the tens of thousands of media and public attendees, both the hardware and software worked flawlessly."

Hardware Headaches Inevitable? 73

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the hardware-is-always-a-headache dept.
JaneWalker6847 writes "Don Becker, co-founder of the Beowulf project, describes the inevitability of hardware administration headaches and warns users not to expect a silver bullet to solve these problems." From the article: "We're about to see another revolution, which is in network adapters -- that we [will] talk directly to [them] from application level. That's a massive change in how you interface with them. And that brings about a new round of device drivers completely unlike the device drivers we had 10 years ago. So, that part of the world isn't going to stabilize anytime soon."

Building Your First Cluster? 71

Posted by Cliff from the it's-been-a-while dept.
An anonymous reader asks: "I'm interested in building a DIY cluster using Linux and will be using conventional Linux software. However, the number of possible ways to do this is huge. Aside from Beowulf, there's Mosix, OpenMosix, Kerrighed, Score, OpenSSI and countless others. Therein lies the problem. There are so many ways of clustering, development seems to be in fits and starts, most won't work on recent Linux kernels and there's no obvious way to mix-and-match. What have other people used? How good are the solutions out there?"
Unix

Linux in a Business - Got Root? 464

Posted by Cliff from the control-your-own-destiny dept.
greenBeard asks: "I work for a government contractor, and have recently convinced them to purchase a Beowulf cluster, and start moving their numeric modelers from Sun to Linux. Like most historically UNIX shops, they don't allow users even low-level SUDO access, to do silly things like change file permissions or ownerships, in a tracked environment. I am an ex-*NIX admin myself ,so I understand their perspective and wish to keep control over the environment, but as a user, I'm frustrated by having to frequently call the help-desk just to get a file ownership changed or a specific package installed. If you're an admin, do you allow your users basic SUDO rights like chmod, cp, mv, etc (assuming all SUDO commands are logged to a remote system)? If no, why don't you? If you allow root access to your knowledgeable users (ie developers with Linux experience), what do you do to keep them 'in line'?"
Announcements

Ohio Linux Festival 2005 90

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the groups-of-people-that-know-the-real-score dept.
corso64 writes "Ohio Linux Fest 2005, a free conference/event for Linux and OSS enthusiasts, looks to be every bit as good, if not better than Ohio Linux Fest 2004. Last year, IBM, Novell, Apache, Beowulf, Mozilla, along with Jon "Maddog" Hall made Ohio Linux Festival 2004 a huge success along with tons of swag, freebies, and door prizes (including a Linus-autographed cdrom of the original source release of Linux). This year IBM, Novell, Apache, Digium, KDE and others will be doing sessions on Asterisk, KDE, Digital Forensics,Unified Threat Management, Ubuntu, Server Farms and lots of other topics. Check it out this October 1st!"
Education

Beowulf Pioneer Lured From Cal Tech to LSU 163

Posted by Hemos from the and-straight-into-katrtina dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Thomas Sterling, a pioneer of clustered computing, including /.'s beloved Beowulf cluster, has has accepted a fully-tenured professorship at Louisiana State University's Center for Computation and Technology, ditching his old post at Cal Tech. From TFA: "At LSU, he hopes to develop the next generation of high-performance computers that will give birth to true artificial intelligence. By making computer chips more efficient, Sterling believes he can change computing by "one to three orders of magnitude" that will transform how humans interact with technology.""
United States

Oregon Government Supporting Open Source 124

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the lets-get-em-all-on-the-wagon dept.
amountlad writes "In a pair of articles released today on N4N.org, Oregon continues to lead the way in government open source adoption in the USA. The Oregon State University's Open Source Lab will host a Government Open Source Conference in October. The GOSCON has strong support from within the state government. The State's Department of Administrative Services released a white paper detailing their use of Asterisk for audio conferencing for more than 500 conferences a week. The set-up includes a web-based interface for judges to manage recording the hearings. In doing so the State joins Metro, a Portland area regional government which uses Asterisk along side its Beowulf Cluster."
Supercomputing

iMac Beowulf Cluster Comes to Life 56

Posted by timothy from the taste-the-rainbow dept.
AmigaAvenger writes "Finally a good use for all those old IMacs that many organizations have laying around collecting dust. We have set up a 5 node (4+1 controller) iMac beowulf cluster, which is appropriately named Skittles, and is running PPC Yellowdog Linux, with MPICH 1.2.6 cluster message passing software."
Movies

Robert Zemeckis to Direct Beowulf Movie 206

Posted by CowboyNeal from the new-takes-on-classics dept.
jangobongo writes "Robert Zemeckis, who directed the Polar Express and Back To The Future among many others, will helm a new remake of the epic tale of Beowulf. Sony Pictures is in discussions to distribute the picture. (This version is unrelated to another remake scheduled to be released in 2005 titled Beowulf & Grendel, which is currently in post-production.)" I have no idea which version will make for a better film, but this one has Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary writing the script for it as well.
Science

Solar Shingles 63

Posted by michael from the bet-your-bottom-dollar dept.
buzban writes "Wired is carrying a cool story about a solar panel technology with a form factor like roofing shingles. Sort of a beowulf cluster of small, (relatively) attractive solar panels, if you will..."

Neal Stephenson Responds With Wit and Humor 684

Posted by Roblimo from the this-guy-ought-to-turn-pro dept.
There is nothing better than a Slashdot interview with someone who not only reads and understands Slashdot but can out-troll the trolls. Admittedly, the questions you asked Neal Stephenson were great in their own right, but his answers... Wow! let's just say that this guy shows how it's done.
Hardware

Where to Spend $1M on a Cluster? 104

Posted by Cliff from the shopping-for-beowulfs dept.
Natchswing asks: "My university has been given a $757,825 NSF grant to build, 'A 256 node (128 pair) Beowulf parallel computing cluster ... to improve the realism of gravity-wave modeling by permitting treatment of the three dimensional problem and multiple wave interactions.' They want to pay a company to just show up and drop off a functional cluster rather than build it themselves. Since word has leaked out regarding the purchase intent, every computer manufacturer under the sun (including Apollo himself) has called up trying to sell their cluster. Since I'm no cluster expert, I'm writing Slashdot. If you had $0.7 mil to buy a pre-built cluster who would you go with and why?"
United States

Does A Pentium 4 Need A Weapons License? 766

Posted by timothy from the it-can't-even-carry-a-gun dept.
WindBourne writes "It appears to be that the U.S. house of Reps. want to classify Pentium 4 and above CPUs as weapons. This would mean that all these will require export licenses. Apparently, they have not heard about that the far east has developed large CPUs as well that are used in beowulf clusters." According to the article, this clause is unlikely to appear in the final version -- but stranger things have happened.
The Internet

2ch: Japanese Web Forum As Social Vent 275

Posted by timothy from the with-deep-sea-vent-worms dept.
News for nerds writes "This NY times article (reg blah blah) sheds the light on Japan's largest Internet bulletin board - 2ch. About 5.4 million people come to this "Channel 2" each month, many of them several times a day (just like you nerds making beowulf cluster of alphabets all the day!). Founded in 1999, "ni-channeru," as it is called there, has become part of Japan's everyday culture as no other Web site has. While you can also find useful info such as dinner recipes there, it's almost like Battle Royale came into life as a web site, filled with verbal and physical violence backed by pseudo anonymity."
Programming

HA-OSCAR 1.0 Beta release - unleashing HA Beowulf 90

Posted by Hemos from the let-it-loose dept.
ImmO writes " The eXtreme Computing Research (XCR) group at Louisiana Tech University is pleased to announce the first public release of HA-OSCAR 1.0 beta. High Availability Open Source Cluster Application Resource (HA-OSCAR) is an open source project that aims toward non-stop services in the HPC environment through a combined power of High Availability and Performance Computing solutions. Our goal is to enhance a Beowulf cluster system for mission-critical applications and downtime-sensitive HPC infrastructures. To achieve high availability, component redundancy is adopted in HA-OSCAR cluster to eliminate single point of failures, especially at the head node. HA-OSCAR also incorporates a self-healing mechanism; failure detection & recovery, automatic failover and fail-back. The 1.0 beta release supports new high-availability capabilities for Linux Beowulf clusters based on OSCAR 3.0 It provides an installation wizard GUI and a web-based administration tool that allows a user to create and configure a multi-head Beowulf cluster. A default set of monitoring services are included to ensure that critical services, hardware components and important resources are always available at the control node. "
The Courts

SCO Aims For The Feds 492

Posted by Hemos from the the-battle-continues dept.
MoFoQ writes "News.com reports that SCO is now targetting the Feds and their supercomputers (the Beowulf clusters, etc.). Looks like they bit off more than they can chew, even before winning a single case "

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