Clustermatic: Supercomputing made easy – almost
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Penguin roundup
Getting the PCs to cooperate is like herding penguins, Minnich says.
PCs typically start by loading the BIOS – Basic Input-Output System. The BIOS gives a computer instructions it needs to work with things like a keyboard and mouse before the main operating system loads.
But the BIOS usually isn’t designed for parallel computing, and causes headaches in a cluster arrangement.
So Minnich and his fellow researchers replaced it with LinuxBIOS, a program written in the C high-level computer language and using selected components from the open-source Linux operating system. Each clustered PC, called a node, loads LinuxBIOS from its own flash memory chip.
LinuxBIOS tells the node to talk to a PC designated as the control node – the conductor of the PC orchestra. “It says, ‘Tell me what to do,’” Minnich says.
LinuxBIOS creates “a computer node that immediately is remote controlled. It doesn’t need a floppy or a disc that it boots from.”
The control node distributes programs to the compute nodes and parcels out tasks. For speed, it enlists several compute nodes, telling them to pass along programs the way a teacher might have a few volunteers hand out worksheets to the rest of the class.
LinuxBIOS is the foundation of the Clustermatic software stack, Minnich says, but the software suite includes other cluster computing tools:
- BProc, or Beowulf Distributed Process Space, lets the control node – the conductor – see what’s happening in the compute nodes – the orchestra.
- Supermon monitors progress on the compute nodes with no discernable impact on their function. That’s unusual in high-performance computing, where monitoring often saps processor resources.
- Beoboot allows large clusters to start quickly by recruiting the first successfully booted nodes to help boot the others. Beoboot can start a 1,000-node cluster in about 2.5 minutes, compared to hours for some clusters.
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