Category Archives: Linux

Linux

Amazon EC2’s New Images

Amazon.com is really the leader right now in so-called “cloud computing”, where there’s some anonymous cluster of servers that you somehow use for various reliable services.

They started with “S3“, meaning “Simple Storage Service”. S3 is a back-end web service that allows you to place, retrieve, and share files via some sort of web back-end interface. As I’m not really a web developer, that interface is beyond me for the moment. However, various programs have cropped up that act as a front-end to S3, my favorite being JungleDisk. Once JungleDisk is fired up, you have what appears to be a network disk with unlimited storage. It is, in fact, effectively unlimited, though it of course comes at a cost. There’s a bandwidth cost whenever you move things to and from, and an ongoing storage cost. The ongoing storage cost is something like a charge based on your “average daily balance” of storage used, and is currently charged at a mere $0.15/GB/month. So, if you want to store 100 GB, that’s $15/mo. Not bad. Remember, too, that you’re never paying for storage that you don’t need, unlike some other services.

After they got S3 stabilized, Amazon.com came out with another beta “cloud” service, the “EC2“, for “Elastic Compute Cloud”. They let you run virtual machine images, basically, charged at an hourly rate. This was kind of interesting, and had some usefulness for a lot of people, but the machines were somewhat small and weak.

No more.

Within the last few days, they launched larger machine images with an x86_64 architecture, up to 4 virtual cores, and nearly 16GB of available RAM. Now we’re talking something interesting for people like me, and our lab. As a test, I created my own custom image, containing our simulation software, and fired it up. For $0.80/hour, I can get the equivalent of 2 of our 2-core Opteron cluster nodes. It’s a little slower than that, but only just. It also probably doesn’t scale as well as our current system, and I know it won’t scale as well as the system that will be arriving on Monday, but something tells me that this will change. I’m not the only one out there that wants to run cluster applications on EC2, as a quick google search will reveal.

Furthermore, this is a relatively cheap and ubiquitous platform that would allow someone to run high-performance applications without the overhead of purchasing a complete cluster. It would be good for, say, starting a business that required a large amount of computing power without having to purchase, store, feed, cool, and house all of that hardware up front. Once things got rolling it would be possible to use revenue to purchase and maintain such dedicated hardware.

The one major down-side of EC2, as I see it, is that it doesn’t save any of the data on the machine once the machine is shut down. One has to ship the data off to S3 (no charge) or another machine (bandwidth charges apply) before shutting it down. Nonetheless, as the tools for interacting with S3 improve, I expect that this limitation will disappear as well.

I should note that I’m not affiliated with either Amazon.com or JungleDisk in any way, except as a happy user.

MareNostrum

Via Adventures in Applied Math, on Gizmodo, the world’s most gorgeous (possibly) supercomputer. It’s #9 in the world and #1 in Europe, and belongs to the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.

Actually, the computer’s nice and all, but it’s really the “server room” that’s gorgeous. It’s installed in a glass enclosure, inside a former chapel.

See the photos at Gizmodo here.

Warming up to the Foleo

When I first saw the press release for Palm’s new Foleo device, I was underwhelmed. If you read any comments on tech sites discussing the Foleo, you’ll see I’m not the only one. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of info out about the thing. However, after some digging, I’m getting kind of excited.

You see, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Seat-back and Laptop Gambit. This is where you open your laptop on an airline seat-back tray, and because there’s so little room, the top of your display has to go under the ledge where the tray table normally stows. Now, if the person in front of you suddenly leans their seat back, it could potentially crush or snap your display in half. Not only that, you’re basically screwed as far as getting work done goes at that point. This is a problem even with my 13″ MacBook.

The Foleo is the perfect size. It’s just as big as it needs to be to accommodate the (supposedly?) full-size keyboard. I still want to know whether it’s possible to check email with it over wifi — the press stuff they’re putting out is obsessively tied to syncing with a Treo. However, I saw something today that got me really excited. this article says you can get to a BASH terminal on the Linux-based Foleo.

This has potential!

Ease of Install: Vista 0, FC6 1

Our new post-doc requested both Vista and Fedora Core on his workstation. I started off with Vista. First, it didn’t see any disks. Then, I provided it with drivers for the RAID controller, and it saw the two volumes. However, it refused to install on either, saying they “weren’t suitable” for Vista. Finally, I had to un-hook the disks from the hardware RAID controller, and hook them straight up to the system board.

Contrast this with Fedora Core 6 installation: it finds both volumes, and installs onto either just fine.

Yet, FC6 is free, Linux is supposedly more difficult to install, and Vista Ultimate costs an arm and a leg.

I am annoyed.

ADDENDUM: The Vista install just hung, hard. Good job guys.

I crashed the cluster (but I did not hose the filesystem)

I managed to crash the cluster today while moving raid units around on the raid card. Luckily there weren’t too many simulations running at the time. However, this seemingly innocuous activity will now be relegated to scheduled maintenance times. Apparently the Linux kernel doesn’t like disappearing SCSI drives.