Big Cluster Project 11 April 2006

Come help us make a big parallel cluster on 11 April 2006!

• If you are in CS 521, you'll get five points credit for participating (details below).
• It's after instruction ends but before exams start, so you have no excuse.
• It'll be right before Tuesday Tea.
• Brett says he'll get Google to buy pizza for us.
• It'll be fun!

We want to get a lot of computers, where "a lot" is on the order of 40.

We want to run a cool parallel program on the cluster. If you have a suggestion, add it to the list below. The suggestions we have so far

• Finding large prime numbers
• LINPACK

Something graphical -- something interesting to watch -- would be more fun than something purely textual like prime numbers.

CS 521 credit

To get CS 521 credit, you need to do the following:

• Burn a (tbd) CD.
  • BCCD, with booting instructions -- advertised as working on Macs with different downloads
• Boot your laptop from that CD to make sure that the burn was correct, that your system will boot, etc.
• Bring your computer(s) and the CD to (tbd location). Laptops are preferable, since we might be limited in the number of power outlets we will have.
  • If you don't have a laptop, you can bring in your desktop; we will have at least one monitor that we can swap around.
  • If you don't have a laptop, you can borrow one for four hours (not renewable) from Koerner Library or Woodward Library, Circulation Desk, entrance level.
• Be fully prepared to boot your own computer as a slave, and to help out anyone who showed up who is not in 521 (i.e. who has even less experience than you have).

Making a bootable CD

Making a bootable CD is not as easy as you might think. On Linux, there are some unspecified issues with cdburner for kernels newer than @@@; there is some documentation on the Web that says they have been fixed in 2.6.11, but DuckySherwood had problems even with 2.6.11. @@@

• http://www.geocities.com/potato.geo/bootlinuxcd.html

These are links that Ducky is in the process of looking at in trying to figure stuff out...

• Mandrake bootable CD instructions:

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=mandrake-cooker-ppc&m=99441208917647&w=

• IBM http://penguinppc.org/ppc64/power-bootable-iso/

http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/bootcd.html#creating-the-image

From http://www.geocities.com/potato.geo/bootlinuxcd.html: First, download the iso.img.gz file. Decompress it with gunzip and burn it to a CD (I'd suggest a CDRW) using cdrecord or if you want to do it from Windows, you probably just need to rename it to blah.iso and Easy CD Creator or whathaveyou should be able to burn it.

Eroaster

Macs:

• There is some shareware called BootCD that makes a boot CD ?from currently running OS?
• LiveLinux distros of Ubuntu
• RockLinux http://www.rocklinux.org/149.html