My Samsung Galaxy S (Vibrant on T-Mobile) has been the toughest phone I own. I even managed to drop it in a pool, let it dry out and it is still working today. The gorilla glass on this phone is amazing. It lives in my pocket with no screen protect and with change, pens and sometimes keys and doesn't have any noticeable scratches. About the only thing that bothers me is that the GPS is crap, but that isn't high on my list of priorities. I will definitely go with the SGS II or the SGS 3 if that is out by the time I can upgrade late next year.

Enhanced? What is it enhancing? What is this $10 buying besides a spot in their wallet and not mine. Thanks but no thanks.

This post is full of good information. I have been managing HPC for seismic companies for the past 8 years now. I regularly use xCAT as I find that after a few nodes automation is the way to go.

You will find that most clusters run RedHat or a variant of the OS. Most places run CentOS on the nodes and have a machine with RedHat stashed around somewhere in case a problem occurs and they need to reproduce it on a "supported" OS.

Why is there a requirement for a full blown X install? Are these machines desktop boxes or are they racked? Typically you have a thin client software installed at the cluster gateway. We use both NX and ThinAnywhere today.

Actually quite a few of the jobs will be in Colorado according to this Denver Post article http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_18132552.

Nor will you be charged for going over your cap, simply throttled. Thank you T-Mobile for being clear in your advertising and dropping the frequently inaccurate term of unlimited for your data plans.

I love your feed, I have been following you for quite a while on twitter. I know a lot of the tips and tricks that come up but at least once a week something new to me shows up.

I have been a systems administrator for over 10 years and I find the command line invaluable. Even the geophysicists ask me to write quick one use awk scripts to format a file into something usable.

Actually education is there for the taking. There are those who seek out knowledge.

While I agree for the most part I think you may be missing an important facet of a software based inventory system.

With a software based system that is kept up to date you can know without having to count physical items if you have enough parts for a particular project.

Just my quick $0.02 on the subject.

Time for overkill solution number 1:

1) Buy a SIP to POTS adapter
2) Install asterisk on your Linux server (You do have a Linux server right?)
3) Create a web app, preferably Ruby on Rails, that connects to Asterisk over the management port and dials a phone number and rings it back to your home phone line
4) Profit until the system breaks and the wife wrings your neck because she can't call to make her beauty salon appointment!

Enjoy!

A cluster is a collection of, usually, homogeneous compute nodes. They are usually split into MPI and SSI, Message Passing Interface of Single Server Image. The latter is a bunch of machines trying to emulate a single system and is not commonly found in the HPC world. You are more likely to find MPI setups where each bit of processing can be broken into smaller pieces and distributed to each node.

For a render farm you can have machines with no knowledge of each other as they can each work on a separate set of frames. If the rendered is MPI aware it can ask neighboring nodes for data.

ROCKS Clusters are MPI based but can be used as individual machines. ROCKS strength is its simplicity in managing the OS image on each of the nodes. You plug a machine into the network, flip it on, wait for ROCKS to find the MAC broadcast during PXE boot and then assign it to a predefined image group. Minutes later you have a machine installed exactly as all other nodes on the cluster are. This is sometimes vitally important as certain software may not work with a different revision of the OS.

ROCKS allows for easy management and easy expandability. If you need more compute power, plug in new nodes, collect the MACs and image.

We have XCAT and post scripts setup to do the majority of our work. Images the machine (PXE generation, DHCP config), installs files based on group, sets the ganglia config. I don't have any monitoring setup on compute nodes as I have ganglia open daily to watch for cluster node failures. Zenoss is done afterwards as I have yet to find a good way to automate that.