Category Archives: Tech

Tech

The cluster is basically done

I started setting up the hardware at around 1600h yesterday.

I finished setting up the underlying software today at around 1900h today.

Not too shabby, eh? According to wwtop:


Cluster totals: 20 nodes, 40 cpus, 96200 MHz, 39.18 GB mem

Here’s a snapshot of the front of the status page:

What an ordeal. Now we have to start compiling PETSC on it.

New Cluster Set-Up

When moving to JHU, we took our 20 cluster nodes which are Evolocity II units from Linux Networx. They were part of a larger cluster at Tulane’s Center for Computational Science. As such, we didn’t need to worry about them — the CCS sysadmin took care of them.

Now that they are here at JHU, they need to be set up on their own. “Who will set them up?” you ask.

*looks around*

Oh, right. So, I’m looking at using Warewulf. It’s targeted to Fedora Core head nodes, and our fileserver Lagniappe is already running Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Server, so I may have a few difficulties there. Also, Warewulf prefers PXE boot, and our nodes use Etherboot on LinuxBIOS. Supposedly this is “backward” compatible with PXE boot, but I’m not sure whether our nodes have a current version of LinuxBIOS or not, so I don’t know if they feature that capability. Luckily, assuming I get Warewulf set up, there’s no difference administratively between running 5 nodes and 500 nodes.

Once it is complete, I will need to install MPI, the intel compilers, and so on.

Daily Work Log 2006-07-25

I spent an hour and a half dealing with e-mail, health insurance, taxes, papers, and so on.

Blech.

A lot of it was stuff I’d been putting off, but was in my system. For some reason this morning felt like the right time to do it. Nobody’s here yet. I recently read a suggestion, I think on 43Folders, not to deal with e-mail first thing in the morning. Unfortunately, it’s something I prefer to have cleaned out, especially because my e-mail account has its own -Action-, -Waiting For-, and -Response- folders to check on.

…

Right now there’s this metaphorical cloud on the horizon. Our lab is moving. We’re leaving Tulane. Sure, we’re going to “greener pastures”, but this city and university have been my home for seven years. This lab, for nearly four. The cloud is not only philosophical — it’s logistical. In a few weeks our servers will be shut down. The following week, all of the workstations will be packed up and shipped off. In one of our most productive times of year, we’re facing substantial downtime, yet deadlines continue to nip at our heels.

Some of us still haven’t got apartments in Baltimore yet. I am included in that group, unfortunately.

…

I went to the Payroll building to take care of my tax situation (no big deal, but needs addressing), and I found that Payroll has become “New Orleans Jazz Orchestra”. At least that’s what the sign says. Apparently they never moved back to campus after Katrina. Everything else moved back, basically.

I wonder why they didn’t move back… oh wait. I know. Because it’s a pain to get them to do anything, and you have to go bug them in person. That’s a lot harder when they’re a 15 minute drive across town, rather than walking distance on campus.

*sigh*

I sent them an email. That’s step 1. Step 2 is to call them.

…

I just spent some time discussing our workstation set-up with Rob and Umar. We currently use a central file server to host people’s home directories, and we remotely mount them on the workstations. Due to increased file I/O and bandwidth issues, that’s no longer a great solution. It also used to be more important, because people shared machines a lot. That doesn’t really happen any more, so it makes more sense for people to have local home directories. We’re going to want mirrored local disks on the workstations, where possible. For the machines where that’s not possible (like laptops) people should back things up onto external disks. I currently do that every night with my powerbook, automatically.

…

Busy day. More news later. I’m going to try to make it home through the rain now.