"J.C. Roberts" <list-...@designtools.org> wrote: > On Fri, 05 Feb 2010 23:39:19 -0500 Predrag Punosevac > <punoseva...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > Dear All, > > > > Could anybody kindly point me to any literature regarding > > building a high-performance computing cluster using OpenBSD. I am not > > interested in FreeBSD and NetBSD related papers on this topics. I can > > find them easily. I am specifically interested in OpenBSD. > > Applications I am planning to run are related to Bifurcation Theory. > > > > Thank You, > > Predrag Punosevac > > Pendrag, > > At one point in time, the phrase "High Performance Computing" (HPC) > actually meant something fairly specific, but over the years it has > degraded to an exceedingly vague buzzword. > > In the classic sense of HPC where you're doing significant amounts of > computation on problems requiring tightly coupled nodes (i.e. hard > parallelization),
That is exactly what I have in mind. I have computations which can be parallelized and which currently require in upward of a week to preform. Usually, after a week we see that we didn't get quite right the initial conditions and we are repeated the thing. After half dozen iteration we usually get things right. That takes about 2 months. We have a pile of blades (i386/amd64) laying around and my idea (even that I have never done that) before is that we tightly couple and try to reduce the computation time to less then a day per computation. > asking for OpenBSD specific papers on this topic is > the equivalent of asking for papers on using a hammer to trun a screw. > > In the case of using classic HPC on hard parallelization problems, > OpenBSD is the wrong tool for the job. The reason is OpenBSD does not > support vast amounts of RAM, and it doesn't have support for fast > memory interconnects (Myrinet, SCI, ...). > I had a hunch that OpenBSD is a wrong tool but I wanted to make sure that I am not missing anything. That is why I posted the question. C.J. which OS would you pick. A main FreeBSD paper on cluster computing is from 2003 when SMP support was immature. Now they have ULE, good SMP I would have to check for other things. NetBSD mailing list tech-cluster is dead. NetBSD amd64 does support lots of RAM. They seem to have a great SMP support now. I see that NetBSD was used in the past for those things. If it has to be Linux would you go with a RedHat? Please tell me little bit more. > If the problems you're trying to solve do not have intensive memory > requirements and qualify as easy parallelization (a.k.a. > "Embarrassingly Parallel"), then you do not need a tightly coupled > cluster and OpenBSD could be a good choice. > > In essence, it comes down to the specific problem(s) *YOU* are trying > to solve, so you *REALLY* need to elaborate on your problem domain(s) > and how you are trying to solve them. Well I said it is computation of Bifurcations around homoclinic orbits as well as computing of fast responding curves. I just got in into the team. At this point I am not even sure if the simulations by co-workers want to do are events of positive measure. I am thinking about it. I am more of a guy who is proving theorems rather than trying to compute something but as you can see I do not mind getting my hands dirty. > > Off the top of my head, one of the best people on this list to ask > would be Todd Fries since he works on LAM/MPI (OpenMPI). I would definitely do so if he doesn't respond within next couple of days to this thread. > > And yes, though I doubt Poul-Henning Kamp found it humorous, the very > first cluster I built was really named "PHK" :-) > > -jcr Thank you so much for this great answer! Predrag
