[ML-General] Cluster Computing

Thu Jan 22 21:10:29 CST 2015

In some ways, yes. The biggest limitation with the Edison for me is the
ram. While there is a lot that we could run on it, it's restricts them
enough that I don't think it would be as useful, which changes alters the
true 'cost' of the setup.

Granted, you could probably fit a few hundred of them in a 4U chassis. It
would be an interesting experiment in integration though since they have no
ethernet interface, only wireless.

On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 9:02 PM, Erik Arendall <earendall at gmail.com> wrote:

> I've often kicked the idea around doing this with Arduinos and FPGAs. I
> guess you could also do it with Intel Edison modules. Cost wise the Edison
> modules would better than a PC.
>
> Erik
> On Jan 22, 2015 6:44 PM, "Stephan Henning" <shenning at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> @mc
>> Both. If I start to scale this to a large number of nodes I can foresee
>> many headaches if I can't easily push modifications and updates. From the
>> job distribution side, it would be great to maintain compatibility with
>> condor, I'm just unsure how well it will operate if it has to hand jobs off
>> to the head node that then get distributed out further.
>>
>> @ Brian
>> Our current cluster is made up of discrete machines only about 20 nodes.
>> Many of the nodes are actual user workstations that are brought in when
>> inactive. There is no uniform provisioning method. Every box has a slightly
>> different hardware configuration. Thankfully we do a pretty good job
>> keeping all required software aligned to the sam version.
>>
>> The VM idea is interesting. I hadn't considered that. I will need to
>> think on that and how I might be able to implement it.
>>
>> @david
>> Yup, I'm fully aware this level of distributed computing is only good for
>> specific cases. I understand your position, thanks.
>>
>> -stephan
>>
>> ---———---•---———---•---———---
>> Sent from a mobile device, please excuse the spelling and brevity.
>>
>> On Jan 22, 2015, at 5:54 PM, Brian Oborn <linuxpunk at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I would be tempted to just copy what the in-house cluster uses for
>> provisioning. That will save you a lot of time and make it easier to
>> integrate with the larger cluster if you choose to do so. Although it can
>> be tempting to get hardware in your hands, I've done a lot of work with
>> building all of the fiddly Linux bits (DHCP+TFTP+root on NFS+NFS home) in
>> several VMs before moving to real hardware. You can set up a private
>> VM-only network between your head node and the slave nodes and work from
>> there.
>>
>> On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 5:31 PM, Michael Carroll <
>> carroll.michael at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> So is your concern with provisioning and setup or with actual job
>>> distribution?
>>>
>>> ~mc mobile
>>>
>>> On Jan 22, 2015, at 17:15, Stephan Henning <shenning at gmail.com> 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>
>>> 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> 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>
>>>>> 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>
>>>>>> 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
>>>>>>> > 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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