Big Cluster Project 11 April 2006

(Note: this page is under construction and hasn't been announced yet, so is in massive flux.)

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 has a budget from Google for pizza that he's eager to spend on this event.
• 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 bootable BCCD CD (see below).
• Boot your laptop from that CD at home 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

There are a number of different distributions of MPI/LAM, but Ducky recommends BCCD. It is specifically designed for educational use, and has a PPC version so that Mac users can play too. Note that Ducky is in the middle of trying to veify that it works, but hasn't yet.

Linux

Making a bootable CD on Llinux is nowhere near as easy as it ought to be. It's probably not something that you do all the time, so you might have challenges with media, drivers, kernels, applications, or all of the above.

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. @@@

If you have trouble burning from Linux, you can is burn a CD from Windows and then boot that from Linux. Note that if everything is working, you should not need to burn anything except an iso file (Windows) or an iso.img file (Linux) to your CD. Note that if everything is working, you should be able to stick the CD in your drive and restart; you should not need to hold down magic key combinations

• Ducky successfully burned BCCD from Windows and booted on Linux (Kannotix distro, 2.6.11 kernel) using just what Windows offered (::RecordNow, which appears to be distributed with IBM Thinkpads).

Mac

When burning a CD on the Mac, it is important to burn it in "raw" format. (A raw image contains special error detection and correction codes that the CDR software will generate as it is writing the ISO image to the CD. You cannot simply add the image file to the CD layout as you would when recording normal files off your hard drive.) This means that you can't just use the standard method of burning a file onto disk.

Here are instructions from mkLinux on how to burn a raw image:

1. Download a BCCD image
2. Open Disk Copy, which can be found in /Applications/Utilities
3. Choose "Burn Image..." from the "Image" menu.
4. Locate the image you wish to burn (i.e. maindisk.img).
5. Insert a blank CD-R or CD-RW.
6. Click the "Burn" button!

This is slightly different from the UI Ducky found with version 10.2 (Panther) of OS X:

1. Download a BCCD image
2. Open Disk Utility from /Applications/Utilities
3. Choose "Burn..." from the "Images" menu
4. Select the .iso BCCD image from the file picker
5. When it prompts you for a blank CD, insert one
6. Click the "Burn" button!

Note that when you boot from the CD on your Mac, you must hold down the "c" button to make it boot from the CD.

Other distributions of bootable Linux with clustering tools:

• http://www.geocities.com/potato.geo/bootlinuxcd.html (no reports yet from students who have successfully booted from this)
• RockLinux http://www.rocklinux.org/149.html (no reports yet from students who have successfully booted from this)