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MGRID Seminar on Rocks Cluster Toolkit
Presented by: Federico D. Sacerdoti
San Diego Supercomputer Center, San Diego
Thursday, April 28, 2005, 1:30PM at 1180 Duderstadt Center
SLIDES: http://www.rocksclusters.org/talks/umich-2005/rocks-talk.pdf
ABSTRACT:
Commodity clusters have established themselves as the machine of choice for
high performance applications. The Beowulf method of building these parallel
machines was proposed by Thomas Sterling and Donald Becker in 1993, and fast
became the dominant configuration for Linux clusters: commodity components connected
by high speed Ethernet or Myrinet-class interconnects. Practice has shown that
while the hardware for clusters is cheap, easily available, and well supported
by Linux, the process of installing and maintaining the Operating System and
essential middleware (batch and grid systems, interconnect support) on N tightly
coupled machines is a challenge.
The free, NSF-sponsored Rocks Cluster Distribution
has emerged in recent years as the premier method of
building and managing the software stack on clusters
up to 1000 nodes. Rocks employs a complexity-hiding
philosophy that installs and configures nodes with
minimum human interaction, relying instead on a priori
codification of installation procedures that can be
replicated reliably and efficiently. This talk will
present the Rocks system, its purpose, structures for
installation, monitoring and security, and the Roll
extension mechanism. The largest known production Rocks
systems will be discussed, along with competing toolkits.
BIO:
Federico D. Sacerdoti is currently a member of the
Cluster Development group, San Diego Supercomputer
Center (SDSC). Mr. Sacerdoti has been a core designer
for the Rocks cluster distribution effort at SDSC
almost since its inception in 2000. Additionally,
he has contributed to influential HPC projects including
the Ganglia monitoring system and the KeLP parallel
message-passing libraries. Mr. Sacerdoti received
his BS in Computer Engineering from Washington University
in St. Louis,
and MS in Computer Science from University of California,
San Diego.
His thesis work was in the area of dynamic cache optimizations
for parallel applications.
Directions and Maps to the Pierpont Commons can be found at:
http://www.umich.edu/~commons/
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The MGRID initiative is intended to create a collaborative research and development center for faculty, staff and students from participating units, with a central core of technical staff, led by a nationally recognized leader in grid computing. The goal of the MGRID initiative is to develop ... read more 
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