Linux Distro turns PCs into Night-time Clusters 200
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."
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.
Re:Useful? (Score:2)
Re:Useful? (Score:4, Informative)
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".
Re:Useful? (Score:2)
Re:Useful? (Score:2)
DataSynapse [datasynapse.com] is one of the more prevalent vendors of cross-platform grid computing solutions.
Re:Useful? (Score:2)
I believe that the electricity used by a distributed network of PCs is more expensive than renting time on a supercomputer. This formula gets more attractive, however, when the pCs contain powerful vector processing capabilities similar to those of a G5 PPC chip. Since not very many businesses have standardized their desktops to G5 hardware, I am skeptical that your claim is true.
Re:Useful? (Score:2)
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 book keeping at night, I'm sure that using spare CPU time could greatly speed up this process and possibly eliminate the need for powerful and expensive servers.
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".
Re:Useful? (Score:2)
I hope this runs on Windows. (Score:2)
Companies could lease this CPU time out if they aren't needing it themselves. Imagine if this became popular how it could be useful to a company like Pixar. Instead of the time, money, and energy of hosting their own rendering farm they could lease time from companies. They could probably lease the time cheaper than they could setup their own cluster and they could lease almost unlimited amounts of time such that rendering could be sped up a lot (in real time, still the same amount of CPU time). There are lots of uses for CPU time out there so why not use it? And since these are mostly LANs the connections are much faster than attempts to do this kind of CPU time leasing in clusters over the Internet.
Re:Useful? (Score:4, Funny)
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
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 on the netboot servers, and just reboot all the machines. You could either reboot them remotely, set them to automatically reset at a certain time, or just have employees hit the reset button at the end of the day.
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).
WOL: yes it does (Score:2)
Re:WOL: yes it does (Score:2)
Re:Do I lose the use of my CD drive? (Score:2)
Hell I have a box that multiboots win98, 2k, xp, debian linux 2.4 or 2.6, obsd, and netbsd on my internal network. (Yes all those os' are one one system with one hard drive.) I ssh in to my firewall and then use a perl one liner to send a WOL packet to the system. Then I use cu or tip (serial port programs) and I get a grub prompt over the serial and pick the os to boot. After that I can vnc to the windows installs or ssh to the *nix installs. Try it sometime: 1) make sure the NIC supports WOL 2) connect WOL cable from motherboard to NIC 3) check BIOS power management settings and be sure WOL can be used when the system is off (some BIOS have this off by default) 4) send magic packet like this:
perl -MNet::Wake -e "Net::Wake::by_udp(undef,'target_mac_addy_here')"
I suppose now you're going to tell me how it isn't possible to have a multiboot system or use a serial port to pick an os via a boot manager or vnc into a windows box or ssh into a *nix box, right?
Re:Do I lose the use of my CD drive? (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.
Re:Do I lose the use of my CD drive? (Score:2)
They might have extended the protocol, but if the computer is running it seems like running the request through the OS would be the sensible thing.
BTW, WOL doesn't let you do anything with the computer. You can only turn it on, then it will continue with a normal boot.
Re:Do I lose the use of my CD drive? (Score:2)
Here's a couple of random references to the procedure and required Windows privleges
Restart or shut down remotely and document the reason [microsoft.com]
User Privilege List [microsoft.com]
Re:New to Admining ? (Score:2)
I use it on my HTPC so that the machine can be "off" (and silent) unless I need to use it or access content stored on it remotely. The BIOS also supports scheduled wakeups, which gets used to schedule TV recordings by the software that came with the tuner card.
"off" is only in quotes because no PC is truly not using any power until the power supply is turned off. They all run some small amount of power even when off, much like your TV waiting for signals from the remote.
Re:Do I lose the use of my CD drive? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Do I lose the use of my CD drive? (Score:2)
And for this case, you might not even need WOL... as some motherboards actually support scheduled wakeup operations so you could just have them all with virtual alarm clocks waking up at the appropriate time...
Re:Do I lose the use of my CD drive? (Score:2)
Re:Do I lose the use of my CD drive? (Score:2)
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
Re:Think Lusers. (Score:2)
You mean like this [warnerbros.com]?
Re:Think Gusers. (Score:2)
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 use. In particular, the results from Folding@home will be made available on several levels. Most importantly, analysis of the simulations will be submitted to scientific journals for publication, and these journal articles will be posted on the web page after publication. Next, after publication of these scientific articles which analyze the data, the raw data of the folding runs will be available for everyone, including other researchers, here on this web site.
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 parallel in real time.
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 you saw it. I'd take reliability over that extra power any day.
Kjella
Re:Spare trusted processing power? (Score:2)
Uh, no. I'd know because I'd be using a protocol that verifies the work given back by each node by some method. I'm sure it could be fine tuned to verify some nodes more then others depending on the node's current rating for reliablity.
Re:Spare trusted processing power? (Score:2)
The post above mine has said "it's easy enough for SETI which will verify results..." My point is if you can do it for one mathematical calculation you can do it for certain other types of mathematical calculations. I know for certain that you can distribute ray-tracing work, because I worked for a startup that wrote a multiplatform, multithreaded, distributed renderer.
A controller would send out work and tile the returning image. The Poster above me has said that he would rather use 1 CPU that was reliable rather then distributed computations because he thinks "reliable" and "distributed" are mutually exclusive. I don't know a lot about error correcting but there are people much smarter then me that have solutions to this problem.
Re:Precursor to the Grid? (Score:2)
Re:Precursor to the Grid? (Score:2)
Re:Precursor to the Grid? (Score:2)
I was switching slowly from windows to linux. The process started 7 years ago. I have removed windows from my personal machine 4 years ago. about 1 year ago I started doing that on computers of people in my family.
It had to kae so long time for me, bease I was dependant on AutoCAD. It is a tool working only under windows. And it is used by people in archotecture/engineering part of the market. Honestly - I have now 15 year expertise in autocad, as I was using this tool to have money for a living. Some people watch me as autocad wizard, since I can write some really crazy macros or lisp scripts.
4 years ago vmware was good enough to start using autocad under linux. So it was the time when I switched totally to linux. Today autocad is not working correctly under wine.
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
Re:This is bound to help the cause... (Score:2)
Which is why they need a guide with "Don't Panic" in large, friendly letters.
Ah Hitchhikers... I'm looking forward to the movie far more than Star Wars Revenge of the Sith.
Re:This is bound to help the cause... (Score:2)
Reminds me of when I installed SATAN [fish.com] on my network; boy did I got some strange looks from my boss that day.
Won't be the first or the last time. (Score:2)
Hummmmm. Maybe Satan and Choas go together.
Re:This is bound to help the cause... (Score:2)
Microsoft would have called it the "ActiveChaos Computation Improvement Suite XP" and released it in Embedded, Home, Professional and Server variants whose main difference is the color of the splash screen.
Re:This is bound to help the cause... (Score:2)
a little less biased term would have been "Corporate Linux Advocate" or "Corporate Linux Evangelist".
I suppose you could have been far more biased and used "Corporate Linux Zealot" though...
Reviewing our terms (Score:2)
Offhand I'd say either "evangelist" or "zealot" would have been more adroit choices than "fundamentalist." Linux advocates would be far from any "religion of the book" fundamentalism based on one true text.
So point taken.
Re:This is bound to help the cause... (Score:2)
Would you believe that I have a cluster of 60 high-powered night-time computers in this office building? No? Would you believe a Pentium and 10 BaseT network card? No? Would you believe a Commodore PET and a dog?
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!
Re:WakeOnLan and NetBoot (Score:2)
Of course, replacing the computers with Linux boxes with background processes set to idle would make more sense.
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.
Re:How Old is This? (Score:2)
Oh, come on. We all know that Slashdot is a bit slow...
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?
Re:Swap? (Score:2)
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.
Re:Finally...my pretties will fly. (Score:2)
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 add something like SGE and some wrappers to make any network of Unix boxes act as a coherent system with *very* serious horsepower, or Wattage since we're in the 21st century.
Re:Really (Score:2)
For fairly heavyweight apps we have the machines grouped e.g. There are a bunch of OO machines, GIMP, Mozilla machines etc. It takes advantage of shared libraries; OO is about 90Mb resident, but about 85Mb of that is shared. Along with large CPU caches and pre-loaded shared libraries there are some *huge* performance benefits to be had.
woof! (Score:3, Funny)
Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "zombie process"
Well I'll be a... (Score:2)
In Soviet Russia, Linux runs you!
I had this sort of idea (Score:2, Interesting)
You could encrypt everything {and that would go some way to prevent tampering with the returned results}; but then, if you're going to process encrypted input and return encrypted results, that will eat a lot of your processing power. It's a bit like putting a V8 engine through a three-speed automatic transmission
There is a possibility of "inter-cycling" in certain, limited settings {using corporate desktop machines which typically have only a few gigs of apps and data for RAID-like backups of servers springs immediately to mind}. But outside of these circumstances, switching off when not in use and recycling when done with are the best ways of avoiding waste. There is often plenty of life in a used machine if it doesn't have to run a bloated graphical desktop environment and numerous accessories {wanted and otherwise}. And at least used PCs are something you can store up till you have enough of them to do the task you want to do
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
I need all the acronyms that haven't been used! (Score:2, Informative)
I've got the Cheap and Obsolete part of his setup already, but not setup in an array.
yecrom2
similar thing, without the reboots (Score:2)
Build a heterogeneous cluster with coLinux and openMosix [ibm.com]
Marketing CHAOS for corporations? (Score:2)
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.
WTF??? (Score:2)
And here I thought we were trying to use less electricity...
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
Re:WTF??? (Score:2)
Security an issue. (Score:2)
Yes there is was a paranoid, inexperienced admin, but Seti *was* closed source code and so I really couldn't be sure that it wasn't a nice big back door to my network. Something to think about when entering the wonderful world of "lending" clock cycles. Frankly the idea of the app rebooting the PC and running it's own OS (with no checks and balances on accessing the local drive, etc) is not something that I would sign up for myself. I think the idea is great, but it's best left in a trusted client and preferably in a Java sandbox or the like to make sure that they're not borrowing more than just clock cycles.
Cool idea, awful name (Score:2)
Try a name change -- something like LDCG - Linux Distributed Computing Grid to get more acceptance.
Chip H.
our company started doing this 1990 (Score:2)
It's security dammit! (Score:2)
Many of our systems have sensative data on them. You really want to be exposing that with such a system?
Just because you CAN do something doesn't make it a good idea.
Soon to be renamed SkyNet (Score:2)
YAWNS: Yet Another Workplace Network Supercomputer (Score:2)
The well kept secret of office PC's worldwide (Score:3, Funny)
Cluster within Windows (Score:2)
Re:Seriously?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Seriously?? (Score:2)
Re:Seriously?? (Score:5, Insightful)
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. Lots of projects could be helped by a vast pool of computing power "on tap". Surely somebody could come up with some interesting applications for a ridiculous amount of free CPU time?
Re:Seriously?? (Score:2)
Re:Might be some problems... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Might be some problems... (Score:2)
Could scare someone working in the middle of the night
Re:Go DownUnder! (Score:2)
Re:Is this part of a secret plan... (Score:2)