NYC LOCAL: Wednesday 18 January 2006 NYLUG: Donald Becker on The Evolution of Beowulf Linux Clustering

[secretary]

<blockquote
  what="official NYLUG announcement"
  edits="some small typoes corrected">

 From: Sunny Dubey <info@nylug.org>
 To: NYLUG Announcements <nylug-announce@nylug.org>
 Subject: [nylug-announce] New York Linux User's Group Meeting January 18th, 
2006: Donald Becker -on- The Evolution of Beowulf Linux Clustering

 January 18th, 2006
 Wednesday
 6:30PM-8:00PM
 IBM Headquarters Building
 590 Madison Avenue at 57th Street
 12th Floor, home to the IBM Linux Center of Competency

 ** RSVP Instructions **
 You must RSVP for *EVERY* meeting.
 Register at http://rsvp.nylug.org/
 Check in with photo ID at the lobby for badge and room number.


                              Donald Becker
                                   -on-
                The Evolution of Beowulf Linux Clustering

     Beowulf clusters are scalable performance clusters based on
     commodity computers connected with a private system network.  They
     were named after the NASA Beowulf Project, an effort to develop
     software for and demonstrate the effectiveness of commodity cluster
     computing.

     The challenge of commodity clusters has moved from basic machine
     communication and communication library support to effective
     administration and monitoring of large and changing numbers of
     machines.

     Based on their Beowulf Project experience, Scyld has developed a
     innovative cluster system that dramatically simplifies creating,
     using monitoring and maintaining Beowulf clusters.  This talk will
     describe the evolution of Beowulf systems, using the Scyld system as
     an illustration of how cluster software has advanced from a
     collection of individual ad hoc installations to elegant and
     efficient single system image clusters that incrementally scale and
     tolerate failures.

     The Scyld Beowulf system management model presents the cluster to
     the end user and administrator as a single standard Linux
     installation.  All elements of the system are installed and updated
     on this system, unchanged from a single machine.  Applications are
     started, monitored and controlled just as they would with an SMP.

     Internally the system is structured as a full featured master node
     that controls specialized compute nodes.  The master node has a
     full, standard operating system installation with cluster-specific
     extensions.  Compute nodes are automatically detected and added to
     the cluster.  They are provisioned with only the minimal elements
     required to run applications started from a master, and initially
     are pure process execution slave.  Compute nodes have no
     configuration files, daemons or file systems, either local or
     network, required for the base system.

     This architectures, along with internal mechanisms for job creation
     and directory services, allow building clusters that are maintained
     exactly as a single standard Linux installation while scaling with
     the dynamic addition and removal of machines.  New machines can be
     provisioned with applications just a few seconds after starting a
     network boot.  Machine disconnects or failures are handled
     gracefully, without causing a cascade of failures.

 About Donald Becker

     Donald Becker founded Scyld Computing Corporation in 1998 and is
     currently Chief Technology Officer of Penguin Computing and Chief
     Scientist of Scyld Software, now part of Penguin Computing.  He has
     a long history in compiler development, networking, parallel
     computing and cluster computing.  He co-founded the Beowulf Project
     at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in 1994, and was a major
     developer of the early Linux kernel networking, writing essentially
     all of the network device drivers through 2000.

 Swag (Give Away) - During the meeting... unusually terrific swag of
     non-predetermined origin will be given out to all attendees at the
     regular meeting for free as usual.

 Stammtisch
     After the meeting ... Join us around 8:30pm or so at TGI Friday's,
     located at 677 Lexington Avenue and 56th Street, second floor.
     Northeast corner.

 Please see our home page at http://www.nylug.org for the HTMLized
 version of this announcement, our archives, and a lot of other good
 stuff.
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Distributed poC TINC:

Jay Sulzberger <secretary@lxny.org>
Corresponding Secretary LXNY
LXNY is New York's Free Computing Organization.
http://www.lxny.org