[ML-General] Cluster Computing
david
ainut at knology.net
Thu Jan 22 17:56:49 CST 2015
Surely you realize that not very many problems are appropriate for
cluster computing. For the CPU bandwidth you mentioned, an even smaller
set of problems are practical. Clusters are outstanding at non-linear
compute problems but suck big ones at problems where each answer depends
upon the previous one.
Also, if it is for work and not your personal or charity involvement,
count me out unless your company is willing to pay consultant fees.
David Merchant
On 01/22/2015 05:15 PM, Stephan Henning wrote:
> This is a side project for the office. Sadly, most of this type of
> work can't be farmed out to external clusters, otherwise we would use
> it for that. We do currently utilize AWS for some of this type work,
> but only for internal R&D.
>
> This all started when the Intel Edison got released. Some of us were
> talking about it one day and realized that it /might/ have /just
> enough/ processing power and ram to handle some of our smaller
> problems. We've talked about it some more and the discussion has
> evolved to the point where I've been handed some hours and a small
> amount of funding to try and implement a 'cluster-in-a-box'.
>
> The main idea being to rack a whole bunch of mini-itx boards on edge
> into a 4U chassis (yes, they will fit). Assuming a 2" board-board
> clearance across the width of the chassis and 1" spacing back-to-front
> down the depth of a box, I think I could fit 27 boards into a 36" deep
> chassis, with enough room for the power supplies and interconnects.
>
> Utilizing embedded motherboards with Atom C2750 8-core CPU's and 16gb
> of ram per board, that should give me a pretty substantial cluster to
> play with. Obviously I am starting small, probably with two or three
> boards running Q2900 4-core cpus until I can get the software side
> worked out.
>
> The software-infrastructure side is the part I'm having a hard time
> with. While there are options out there for how to do this, they are
> all relatively involved and there isn't an obvious 'best' choice to me
> right now. Currently our in-house HPC cluster utilizes HTCondor for
> it's backbone, so I would like to maintain some sort of connection to
> it. Otherwise, I'm seeing options in the Beowulf and Rocks areas that
> could be useful, I'm just not sure where to start in all honesty.
>
> At the end of the day this needs to be relatively easy for us to
> manage (time spent working on the cluster is time spent not billing
> the customer) while being easy enough to add notes to, assuming this
> is a success and I get the OK to expand it to a full 42U racks worth.
>
>
> Our current cluster is almost always fully utilized. Currently we've
> got about a 2 month backlog of jobs on it.
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 4:55 PM, Brian Oborn <linuxpunk at gmail.com
> <mailto:linuxpunk at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> If you can keep your utilization high, then your own hardware can
> be much more cost effective. However, if you end up paying
> depreciation and maintenance on a cluster that's doing nothing
> most of the time you'd be better off in the cloud.
>
> On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 4:50 PM, Michael Carroll
> <carroll.michael at gmail.com <mailto:carroll.michael at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> Depending on what you are going to do, it seems like it would
> make more sense to use AWS or Digital Ocean these days, rather
> than standing up your own hardware. Maintaining your own
> hardware sucks.
>
> That being said, if you are doing something that requires
> InfiniBand, then hardware is your only choice :)
>
> ~mc
>
> On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 4:43 PM, Joshua Pritt
> <ramgarden at gmail.com <mailto:ramgarden at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> My friends and I installed a Beowulf cluster on a closet
> full of Pentium 75 Mhz machines we were donated just for
> fun many years ago back when Beowulf was just getting
> popular. We never figured out anything to do with it
> though...
>
> On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 5:31 PM, Brian Oborn
> <linuxpunk at gmail.com <mailto:linuxpunk at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> In my previous job I set up several production Beowulf
> clusters, mainly for particle physics simulations and
> this has been an area of intense interest for me. I
> would be excited to help you out and I think I could
> provide some good assistance.
>
> Brian Oborn (aka bobbytables)
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 4:25 PM, Stephan Henning
> <shenning at gmail.com <mailto:shenning at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> Does anyone on the mailing list have any
> experience with setting up a cluster computation
> system? If so and you are willing to humor my
> questions, I'd greatly appreciate a few minutes of
> your time.
>
> -stephan
>
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