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Linux Distro turns PCs into Night-time Clusters
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Fri Apr 08, 2005 02:49 AM
from the imagine-an-ah-you-know-the-rest dept.
from the imagine-an-ah-you-know-the-rest dept.
renai42 writes "An Australian security firm is about
to launch a clustered Linux distribution based on openMosix that aims to
utilise the unused nightly processing power of corporate desktops.
Dubbed CHAOS, the distro is able to remotely boot a computer and run
it on Linux without affecting the local hard disk. CHAOS is designed
to provide dumb node power to a cluster run by existing full-featured
clustering distributions such as Quantian and ClusterKnoppix."
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Useful? (Score:4, Insightful)
From the Pure Hacking website - Internal on-site penetration testing gives the business the assurance it needs to conduct safely on the internet and with business partners.
It would make a lot more sense if this was only intended for use in demonstrations and testing though, as I can imagine very few companies would feel a need to use this sort of distro on a nightly basis, but for one off activities it may be useful.
Imagine a beo... oh, wait.
Re:Useful? (Score:5, Insightful)
they have a need for computation power that they can't satisfy and this gives them that at no extra investment besides electricity.
if you power them down then they're doing nothing, your investment just sitting on there. by using them to calculate stuff for the engineering department they're doing something usefull and the return on investment on them gets better.
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Re:Useful? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Useful? (Score:5, Informative)
They have been at it so long that they had to write their own message passing system (PROWESS) because MPI was not there yet.
I used to work for them as a computational fluid dynamicist, we were the main consumers of this "cluster".
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Re:Useful? (Score:2)
An idea like this definitely makes sense to the corporate world, much like the idea of the 3rd shift in the industrial world. You might as well make use of your down time. I know a lot of the companies that I have been involved with do automatic
Re:Useful? (Score:2)
Where I work (ehm...) at the univ all PCs are on at night such that others can log in remotely if they need to do distribute their load. And then there are some dedicated number crunching machines. I am not sure if it is appreciated to run SETI-at-home-stuff etc.
Re:Useful? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not a company, but at my university (the University of Bremen, FYI) we have a computer lab full of Dual P4 Fedora boxen, some WinNT boxen and a few antique Sun Blade 100s. At least the Linux boxen are clustered at night and used to bruteforce the student's passwords. If they manage to discover your password your account is locked and you have to go to the admin and have a little talk with him concerning secure passwords.
I can imagine that a lot of companies might be using similar means of making sure that the suits don't use immensely creative passwords like "love", "sex" or "god".
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Re:Useful? (Score:4, Funny)
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Do I lose the use of my CD drive? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Do I lose the use of my CD drive? (Score:5, Informative)
Most entreprise level desktops have Wake On LAN and PXE boot capability. You send a magic packet to each desktop to wakr it up, and then tell the PXE BIOS to boot ClusterKNoppix via TFTP.
It's not that hard to do, even for lazy sysadmins.
Soko
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Re:Do I lose the use of my CD drive? (Score:2, Informative)
It doesn't sound like you've tried this. W.O.L. doesn't power-up the system when it's been shut-off, so it's really not of any use in this situation.
PXE should be almost all you need... Set the machines to boot from the NIC first, and HDD second, but leave the Bootp and TFTP server off during the day... At night, turn
Re:Do I lose the use of my CD drive? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Do I lose the use of my CD drive? (Score:4, Informative)
It doesn't sound like you've tried this.
When configured correctly, it works. We do weekly maintenance and nightly installations of software that way. In some scheduled job, all systems get a wake-on-lan packet and they start, and run some install. The users are never bothered with it, unless their systems are offline at that time (e.g. laptops).
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WOL: yes it does (Score:2)
Re:Do I lose the use of my CD drive? (Score:4, Informative)
You need a network card which supports it as well as a mainboard which supports it (or with built in networking, that usually supports it).
To start it up you send a "magic" package to the NIC which tells it to boot. AFAIK it's just MAC level package with all FF in the data field or something like that. The NIC will then boot the computer just as if you had pressed the power key.
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Re:Do I lose the use of my CD drive? (Score:5, Funny)
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Think Lusers. (Score:5, Funny)
Hell, my nodes are occupied by the dumb during the day, too. Have we found an actual productive use for lusers?
Soko
Wow... (Score:5, Funny)
Karma Burn... (Score:2)
(I love any attempt at a Soviet Russia meme based joke [google.com]... I just picture the smiling face of Yakov in my head.)
Good thing! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Good thing! (Score:3, Interesting)
Unlike other distributed computing projects, Folding@home is run by an academic institution (specifically the Pande Group, at Stanford University's Chemistry Department), which is a nonprofit institution dedicated to science research and education. We will not sell the data or make any money off of it.
Moreover, we will make the data available for others to
Precursor to the Grid? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Precursor to the Grid? (Score:2, Informative)
So yeah not sure if we could ever have a true supercomputer distributed over the net (as it is now, with the light speed as it is!) that's pa
Spare trusted processing power? (Score:2)
It's easy enough for SETI which will verify results, and most would be simply discarded. Same with cracking crypto challenges and a few other. But what about video editing, ray-tracing? Someone could just insert junk into it, and you'd never know until yo
Re:Precursor to the Grid? (Score:2)
This is bound to help the cause... (Score:4, Funny)
IT Director: Um, sure, OK, what's it called?
Corporate Linux Fundamentalist: Um, Chaos?
Could they not of thought of a better name, how about
Re:This is bound to help the cause... (Score:2, Funny)
Nothing puts executives on edge like the word CHAOS in big, bold letters
Won't be the first or the last time. (Score:2)
Hummmmm. Maybe Satan and Choas go together.
CHAOS: Groovy Name (Score:4, Funny)
Actually their first choice was "Mandriva" but somebody had recently taken that "groovy" name... Aahhh, just missed!
for information (Score:4, Informative)
Quality (Score:5, Funny)
What is CHAOS - the supercomupter for your wallet?
The most significant change to the project, as far as the open source community will be conerned, is the quality of the distribution
As they are concerned about quality, any chance they could put all that unused computing power towards a Goddamned spell-checker?
WakeOnLan and NetBoot (Score:4, Informative)
Identify the PC's that COULD theoretically be used, and collect their MAC addresses. Also, configure them to try netboot first, then fall back to booting from the hard drive.
When you want to perform computations, send a WakeOnLAN packet targeted to each of these computers. Wait for netboot solicitations, then, if you have recently sent a WOL packet to that computer, respond with an appropriate netboot directive, booting the PC into a cluster node configuration, with all details loaded from the cluster director.
Otherwise, allow the netboot solicitation to time out, and the computer will boot into its normal configuration.
Not sure how OpenMosix handles nodes that simply vanish, but users could simply reboot the PC when they arrive in the morning, if the computation is still ongoing. Otherwise, the cluster director could remote shutdown/reboot each node prior to the user arriving at work.
Unused PC's would not consume power, cluster node PC's could be instructed to immediately drop the monitor into Power-save mode, etc.
The cluster director could decide how many nodes to start, or the location of the nodes, to optimise the comms between it and the servers.
An idea with potential, I think!
How Old is This? (Score:2, Insightful)
You're kidding me, right? CHAOS has been out for some 2 years (at least). Unless I'm misunderstanding, or another Australian organization is doing this...:
CHAOS Distro [mq.edu.au]
But what do I know.
Usage? (Score:2)
Why just at night? (Score:2)
Initialy the idea was just to simplify maintenance, but doing a make -j 128 kernel_image is quite fun.
Inferno (Score:2)
Swap? (Score:2)
Does this also mean: no swap?
Finally...my pretties will fly. (Score:2)
Converting my old MPEG2 encoded porno movie collection into DivX could really benefit from this.
My ol' PII 300 takes a night per movie basically.
Been going for 60 nights now, only 300 to go.
Could this be a way to get the hole shebang done in a night?
What a wonderous time we live in.
Really (Score:2)
The typical user only makes use of around 1-5% of the power of their machine. That's 95% of your investment sitting doing sweet FA.
So, your OS should have network load balancing built in and when you start a process or sub process it should run on the fastest kit available.
It's very simple to tack this kind of functionality on to Unix (including Linux here). Mozix does it in a rather nicely integrated fashion, but you can
woof! (Score:3, Funny)
Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "zombie process"
No thanks! (Score:4, Funny)
Hello? McFly? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, sign me up with the full knowledge of how many company network policies I would be violating, and the fact that I would not trust them as far as I could throw a datagram.
Hmmm, it quacks like a duck. I would swear they taught us this in both "Social Engineering" and Advertising. Give the "mark" a little benifit, and then take over his world.
The well kept secret of office PC's worldwide (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Seriously?? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Seriously?? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Seriously?? (Score:3, Informative)
The actual booting could be controlled locally.
used for a task outside their control
Yeah, I'd want to see some security measures in place, like running it in User Mode Linux or something. A dedicated client program like SETI@Home is one thing. A full OS with the capability to fsck with your hardware is another.
which doesn't make them any money.
But it could help save them money. Lots of OSS users have no viable way to contribute back to their favorite projects.
Re:Seriously?? (Score:2)
Re:Might be some problems... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Go DownUnder! (Score:2)
Re:WTF??? (Score:4, Informative)
Well, at least in my country, where nuclear power plants like to have a steady load.
Computing on workstations at night is probably waaaaaaaaaaay cheaper than on a supercomputer during the day, then
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