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."
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:Might be some problems... (Score:2, Informative)
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.
for information (Score:4, Informative)
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: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.
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: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).
Re:Go DownUnder! (Score:1, Informative)
"Other Australian inventions are more surprising. Almost every office in the country has a wall-mounted Miniboil (1981), aeroplanes worldwide carry black box flight recorders (1961), and the concept of Racecam TV sport coverage was also developed here (1979)."
From
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s42109
Re:Useful? (Score:4, Informative)
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: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".
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
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