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Scyld to Release Beowulf 2 60

Posted by CmdrTaco from the I-wanna-make-a-beow...-oh dept.
grantedparole noted that Scyld has announced that they'll be releasing Beowulf 2 on tuesday. Scyld's CTO is none other then Don Becker. Presumably they'll be showing this off at ALS this week (ALS is the Atlanta Linux Showcase, and is probably the best of all the Linux shows. Since its in Atlanta, its also the only tradeshow that doesn't require me to take a connecting flight!).
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Scyld to Release Beowulf 2 More

Scyld to Release Beowulf 2

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  • I know! We could have a Beowulf cluster of -- uhh, err, nevermind...

    Alex Bischoff
    ---

  • Grendel's back... (Score:3)

    by JimPooley ( 150814 ) on Monday October 09, 2000 @04:30AM (#721204) Homepage
    ...and this time, it's personal.



    Sorry - couldn't resist it.

    Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems
  • Looks interesting - a good, standard-ish Beowulf distribution with knobs on would be most appealing. But, my applications require large amounts of database-type searches against huge files that change rarely. I want to be able to store that data on the local drives of my cluster rather than shunt it around the machine. I don't think that is very easy to do at the moment... It would be nice if there were accepted ways to do that. Does anyone have any advice BTW?

  • SCYLD makes life Easier (Score:4)

    by Pontiac ( 135778 ) on Monday October 09, 2000 @04:47AM (#721206) Homepage
    If anyone read the Overview [scyld.com] you might have found this interesting tidbit
    "Scyld Beowulf's unified approach extends to the systems installation and boot designs. The operating system on cluster slave nodes is downloaded from the front-end computer. Only a minimal boot image on either a floppy, a CD, or the cluster node's hard disk is required for each cluster node. Once booted, cluster node configuration is controlled by the front-end"

    This is a great feature.. You can upgrade the Kernel or Apps on the entire cluster by simply patching the Master Node..

    I think it's time to start collecting old Compaq's again. But where will I put them all?

    Pontiac

  • Scyld's CTO is none other then Don Becker.

    Umm, excuse my ignorance, but who is Don Becker, and why should it matter that he's the CTO? For one, titles are largely that, titles, and when someone tells me that I should be impressed by an upcoming product because of one person in a high-ranking position, I quickly sell any stock I might have in that company.

    Don't get me wrong, I'm as excited as the next guy about the new release (the next guy's not that excited), but I don't really care who Don Becker if it's news that he's the CTO, it certainly isn't explained at all by this post.

  • Re:Question? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Becker wrote most of the original networking support for Linux. Try dmesg | grep Becker sometime.
  • Damn, beat me to the joke.
  • Donald Becker has written most of the drivers for network cards in linux.
    He has also written some usb stuff to support usb->ethernet interfaces.
    And he works for NASA.. =)


    "One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
  • From the kernel monte [scyld.com] page it's obvious that only i386 architecture is supported. To bad they don't say it right away on the home page.

  • Re:x86 only? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    bang goes my idea for a beowulf cluster of talking toasters then !!!

  • Re:Question? (Score:5)

    by Marillion ( 33728 ) <ericbardes@gm[ ].com ['ail' in gap]> on Monday October 09, 2000 @05:00AM (#721213)
    Don Becker, while at NASA's atmopheric labs, had the vision of using many Linux boxes as a cluster before Linux was even at the 1.0 revision level. He is often creditied as being the inventor of Beowulf. He wrote over half the network drivers in Linux and Beowulf as a means to an end.
  • I don't think it's offtopic at all, I think it's funny.

    I mean, fer chrissakes, he has a 3 digit userid - do you honestly think he's a Beowulf troll? I'd say he's just taking the piss at the Beowolf trolls that he would have seen evolve over the years..

    Think before you mod.

  • I think the traditional "could you make a Bowulf cluster out of those" joke is pretty Redundant (or inappropriate) on this article :)

    Please prove me wrong. I love those jokes on Slashdot :)

  • Duuuuh, doesn't anyone remember the *story* Beowulf, from which the *computing engine* Beowulf gets its name?

    Morons!

    - A.P.

    --
    * CmdrTaco is an idiot.

  • Beowulf still lacking some Mosix features (and vv) (Score:5)

    by sprag ( 38460 ) on Monday October 09, 2000 @05:15AM (#721217)
    [Sorry about my other crap post...return in the subject textbox submits :( ]
    MOSIX has transparent fork-and-forget process migration, but is a bitch to set up. It would be nice if the Beowulf-style setup (and process management tools) were available in a MOSIX like cluster. Beowulf is still for MPI apps and MOSIX is still for "normal" apps, but it will be interesting as these two products develop to see where they overlap...
  • Heh, close; check this page [steelydan.com] for why...
    --
  • This is mildly funny, not offtopic. And, as a bonus, it's totally ontopic: Grendel was the monster that Beowulf fought in the old english epic, "Beowulf".
  • Duuuuh, doesn't anyone remember the *story* Beowulf, from which the *computing engine* Beowulf gets its name?

    Isn't it more likely to be named after Free Trader Beowulf from the roleplaying game Traveller, rather than from the poem based on nordic legends ?
  • No, he just runs a discussion based web site, which the trolls seem to insist on vandalising.
  • That was a joke? Poor you....
  • Are any mirror sites available? As many of you probably already know, trying to get into ftp://ftp.scyld.com/pub/beowulf-2.0-preview/RPMS/ is not a happening event. Thanks, dave
  • Beowulf troll or not everyone saw the joke intially as a small blob on the sunset, running closer and closer occasionally triping and falling flat on its face but still running and laughing like a maniac, it gets closer and you hear it laughing, and when it plunged it's giddy [giddy3.co.uk] knife into your kneecaps it was as expected and predicted.

    Ho-hum.

    I don't know if the lad's a troll, but funny? Bah.

  • I wasn't trying to, honest, although it does seem to have worked as a troll. Hmmmm, I might start doing it to every story.....
  • *Cough* Who is this [beowulf.org]?

    AFAIK, it _is_ named after the mythical dude that killed Grendel. Even if it isn't, it's still a rather cool name.

    Hey, even my .sig is ontopic!

  • Nope.

    It is from the classic poem

    From their page

    What does Scyld stand for? Is it an acronym?

    -The name Scyld comes from the Beowulf legend. It also works out well as an acronym

    http://www.scyld.com/FAQs.html

    So if the name of the company is from the legend....follow me?

  • Fuck yes.

    These kids today, no culture. Christopher Lambert was the highlander and you must worship him.

  • I stand corrected Its just I presumed the Traveller Beowulf would be known by more geeks than Beowulf the poem. Does that mean you get taught the poem at school in the US as well ?
  • That was trollin'? Ha-ha-hahahahaha.... Ok, Ok. Let's end this here. Peace Ok ?
  • Imagine there's no OS
    It's easy if you try
    No tasks below us
    Above us only MPI
    Imagine all the slave nodes
    Living for today...

    Imagine there's no software
    It isn't hard to do
    Nothing to sell or buy for
    And no holy wars too
    Imagine all the slave nodes
    Computing in peace...

    You may say I'm a dreamer
    But I'm not the only one
    I hope someday you'll join us
    And the cluster will be as one

    Imagine no possessions
    I wonder if you can
    No need for slow performance
    A brotherhood of RAM
    Imagine all the slave nodes
    Sharing all the world...

    You may say I'm a dreamer
    But I'm not the only one
    I hope someday you'll join us
    And the cluster will live as one
  • You're right...
    I should be coding right now too... ;) Maybe tomorow, today is Monday so I'm lazy.
  • I can't speak for everyone, but I read beowulf in 10th, 11th, 12th grade, as well as in 2 different Lit courses in University (all in the US). Since it's the considered one of the earliest "great" writings (well by a white person anyway `;^) it seems to pop up again and again.

    I still dig it though, and have actually read it several times on my own. (A cool modern Sci-fi adaptation is the beowulf series by Larry Niven, which include Beowulf's children and the Children of Heorot (released under a different name in the UK)).

    rev

  • Goodbye Slashdot. This is my last ever post.

    The signal-to-noise ratio has reached an all-time low with this discussion. Intelligent conversation has been replaced with immature rantings and stale jokes.

    The whole site is now hopeless. The first amendment has a lot to do with it.

  • PVFS: http://parlweb.parl.clemson.edu/pvfs [clemson.edu] just might do the trick.

    turn each node of your cluster into an I/O node and make use of both extra disk space and parallel I/O. It's quick, fast, and good.

  • If they havn't worked out an easy method of getting computers properly beowulfed in an easy manner why are they working on another spec?

    I would love to take a bunch of cheap computers and then connect them and use all their computational power to do various tasks but it's just really not that easy to do or set up. Seems that the only people who are using beowulf setups are scientific researchers that make their own configs from scratch.

  • The Scyld Beowulf-2 distribution you can buy from LinuxCentral.com [linuxcentral.com]is x86 only, but we support other architectures.

    The only x86 specific feature is the cool "Two Kernel Monte", a kernel module which allows you load a new kernel(!). T-K-M is useful for any Linux system, not just for Beowulf.

    The Alpha AXP is supported only with custom distributions because the Alpha requires a kernel matched to the specific motherboard type. That would mean two dozen CD-ROMs instead of just one.

    We previously had Sparc-32 support, but that has been dropped. Beowulf is focused on price/performance. Sparcs are expensive and slow.

    PowerPC support is planned. The Beowulf-2 system is based around BProc, which requires processor specific modifications to the kernel. For instance we add a new executable type to the kernel and "VMA dump" to save an executing program to a file or network stream. So it's way more than just a recompile to support a new architecture.

  • Re:distributed file system (Score:3)

    by Greg Lindahl ( 37568 ) on Monday October 09, 2000 @07:07AM (#721238) Homepage

    Your problem doesn't need a fancy solution. Copy the database to all the local hard drives, and use them from there. When you change the database, recopy it. If "rarely" is "rarely enough", that simple solution will get you there.

    From your name, it sounds like you're doing gene sequence searches. Lots of people do it that way.

  • Can you imagine a single node of these things?

    Karma can't be earned as it can only be handed out by the Cosmos

  • We'll miss you. To rejoin Slashdot, click here [goatse.cx]

  • The Beowulf Song (Score:4)

    by rellort ( 146793 ) on Monday October 09, 2000 @07:15AM (#721241)
    --To the tune of Van Halen's "Panama"

    Jump back, what's that sound?
    Here it comes, case open power down.
    Cold boot, running through the fs check.
    Awesome parallel. Running on Intel.

    Don't ya know I'm gonna 0wn SETI?
    I'm gonna factor primes.
    I'll find pi....

    Beowulf!
    Beowulf!
    Beowulf!
    Beowulf-ulf-ulf-ulf-ulf-ulf-ulf

    Ain't nothing like it, a cruddy machine.
    Take some old Pentiums and a Red Hat CD.
    NIC cards, buy 'em by the crate and save.
    Got some 100-base running through my bedroom.

    Don't ya know I'm gonna 0wn SETI?
    I'm gonna factor primes.
    RC5....

    Beowulf!
    Beowulf!
    Beowulf!
    Beowulf-ulf-ulf-ulf-ulf-ulf-ulf

    (spoken)
    Yeah, we're running a little bit hot tonight.
    I can barely see the screen from the heat comin' off of it.
    I reach down, between my legs....
    Pop the CD tray....

    You're flustered. I'm clustered.
    Like a Cray running in my closet now.
    Got the boxes. Alan Cox's.
    Mips a floppin', ain't no stoppin' now!

    Beowulf!
    Beowulf!
    Beowulf!
    Beowulf-ulf-ulf-ulf-ulf-ulf-ulf
  • I think I catch your singular wit. Traveller was a fun game, but obscure which makes yours a statement on the narrowminded monomeniacle lifestyle lead by geeks these days hilarious.

    Surely I've been tempted to ask for a moderation value of "Writer should get more hobbies" since I feel like submiting that to about 1/3 of the posts I read here which are about imagionary dilemas and value systems that only work in a world without resources and economics.
  • MOSIX and "beowulf"-type clusters are totally different beats.

    MOSIX just migrates the application to one computer, beowulf is about letting it run on many computers at the same time. To do the latter, the applications need to programmed differently - no matter how people would want it to be, someone needs to split the computation into parts which can be computed at the same time. Some operations can be done by compilers (like for loops without inter-dependecies in the data) and others (like some common linear algebra routines) can be placed in libraries, but there's not going to be an automatic system for parallellizing everything: Knowing what parts of the problem can be computed at the same time and what data is needed to do so will continue to be important for scientific apps.

    There is no overlap.
  • ... a Beowulf cluster of all these lame "can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of..." jokes?

    Scary!

  • We have created a much easier to use and maintain cluster system!

    Once the software has been installed on the front-end machine (which adds three Beowulf-specific questions to a standard install), adding a new compute node takes only a few seconds more than booting up the new machine. We even provide a button on the "beosetup" GUI to make boot floppies if your system won't boot from the network or CD-ROM.

    Booting is fast because relatively little is initially transferred. The compute nodes typically run with about 40MB of cached library and configuration files.

    This is not a NFS root scheme, which has even more complexity than setting up disk file systems. With BProc we actually eliminate most of the complexity rather just than moving it to some other place in the system.

  • At least offer me some variety....

    I've already tried it 'festering'
    Also....
    Poached
    Grilled
    Simmered
    Boiled
    Skewered
    Stewed
    Gumbo
    Jumbalaya
    and in a hamburger bun....

    My all time favorite is lightly sauteed with a white wine sauce

  • The name changed to be the "Annual Linux Showcase", not the Atlanta linux showcase. My guess is because it's not going to be in Atlanta
    next year.

  • Actually, there is some overlap:
    • Both systems allow processes to be migrated (MOSIX does this automatically, Beowulf has an application which does this + r_fork/r_exec)
    • Both systems require all apps to have a consistant view of the filesystem
    • Both can have an application running on many computers simultaneously, but the methodology is different (fork+IPC vs MPI)
    Given that, Each of the clustering schemes are really just special cases of each other. I'm not suggesting they merge, but it would be nice for them to work together on things like cluster-wide filesystems and process migration issues.
  • that when you
    • post early
    • start a new thread
    • provide a link
    • at least allege having read the story
    your post gets moderated up.

    Something is really wrong with the moderation system here. It stimulates people to post early, even at the expence of quality of information.

  • > I think the traditional "could you make a Bowulf cluster out of those" joke is pretty Redundant (or inappropriate) on this article :)

    But if enough people post the joke, we can make a Beowulf cluster of them.

    --
  • umm, that would have been Col. Decker Not a General, and not a Becker. Try again?

    Steven
  • *sigh* Even before I clicked on the story, I *knew* this would be one of the first five messages...

    guess that means I've been reading Slashdot too long.
  • I wish I had my mod points now. This has to be the single most idiotic, useless, unconstructive, narrow-minded, bigotted, stupid, load of crap I've ever read on /. (and that's up against pretty stiff competition). To quote Greg Stafford, you know very little, and what you know is wrong.

  • Remember when there was a big flamewar between Linus (+ LKML) and Donald over the development process Donald uses? As I recall, there were threats that the official maintainer of many NIC drivers in the Linux kernel tree was going to be switched from Donald to Jeff G(mumble) and Donald's contributions would no longer make it into the tree. Did that threatend action ever take place?

  • yep (Score:1)

    by On Lawn ( 1073 )
    but why you chose to write your post that way is beyond me, exept that the self referencing is kind of quaint.
  • Thats the name of my new Distributed-OS-like OpenSource Projects. If you want a easy way to get the CPU power of anyone that load your page, this system is out, and works. 100% java, 100% opensource, SQL support, etc. Take a look at http://wk1300.8k.com/japps [8k.com]
  • Congratulations, you have just stepped into a much larger world trolling.

    If you would be interested in signing up for the troll mailing list, click here [olsentwins.com].

    rev

  • I like the idea :)
  • Your idea for a moderation option of "Writer should get more hobbies" is pretty cool. Perhaps /. would settle for "Must get out more" but I guess that would require moderators wearing flame retardant underwear. Out of interest Traveller was pretty big in the UK here (almost as big as D&D at one stage) I guess it never caught on stateside though ? (Bit weird considering you invented it ???) Oh well back to writing a requirements spec... Slashdot's great, the best excuse to avoid working I ever found....
  • A meta-Beowulf cluster...

    IIRC there was a company who made just that type of computers (well kinda), the n-cube. I always think of them as a meta-meta-...-meta-beowulf cluster of smp-machines.


    ---
  • I like songs about clustering.

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