Big BLU -- Options

[Drew Taylor]

Even if the individual machines were distributed physically, it seems 
reasonable to ask that each system be running the same OS version. It 
could be as simple as a boot CD (since netbooting over a consumer 
broadband connection would be SLOOOOW). If you can get a complete distro 
on a single CD (Knoppix), it should be relatively easy to do the same 
for our cluster's OS which will have significantly less software.

Drew

miah wrote:

> A requirement of distcc is that each system have the same exact
> version of gcc.  If everybody is running a different distro on their
> systems, this will be a problem.
> 
> -miah
> 
> On Wed, Aug 18, 2004 at 02:30:00PM -0400, Keller, Tim wrote:
> 
>>I was thinking about what Big BLU could be used for and I had a couple of
>>ideas.
>>
>>1. http://distcc.samba.org distcc cluster. This would allow the users todo
>>stuff like recompile an entire distribution for a specific architecture.
>>2. There is a version of povray called MPI-Povray that'll run on a Beowulf
>>cluster.
>>3. Prime Number evaluation
>>
>>That's what comes to mind at the moment.
>>
>>Tim.
>>
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: Jeff Kinz [mailto:jkinz at kinz.org]
>>Sent: Wednesday, August 18, 2004 1:25 PM
>>To: discuss at blu.org
>>Subject: Re: Big BLU -- Options
>>
>>
>>On Wed, Aug 18, 2004 at 12:48:56PM -0400, markw at mohawksoft.com wrote:
>>
>>>We could have a very loose cluster, where we basically keep our machines
>>>at home and they connect to some central server node. This is sub optimal
>>>because the network connection is slow. This would force what ever tasks
>>>we run on this to have a much higher ratio of CPU to data, but it would be
>>>the easiest.
>>
>>A virtual cluster.  This may work better than we think.  Many BLU
>>folks are on Cable or DSL.  Not great for truly distributed processing
>>but we can utilize it with partitionable tasks.
>>
>>
>>>We could start small, only a few machines in someone's basement.
>>
>>Yes, cooler & no weight concerns, AC? Dust? (Dpends on the basement)
>>Spend bucks (below) on paying them for power and AC?
>>
>>
>>>We could all chip in a few bucks and see what that, and the generosity of
>>>some colo, will get us.

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