Hi all,
I've been working lately developing a LiveCD/LiveUSB
which will
dynamically bring up a cluster for a few professors at
my university.
Their issue is that this (LaSalle U.) being largely a
business and
liberal arts university, all their funds go towards
instruments not
geared towards computers (or really research in
general, this is largely
a "teaching" school). However, a few are really into
research in
Chemistry (specifically using ORCA, Gaussian is too
expensive and
actually doesn't do what they need). They've run
their tasks in the
past for weeks at a time on their home computers or
old computers turned
over by the school following student use. I asked,
why not use the
computers for the students when they can't use them?
This sparked my LiveCD endeavor. Now, granted, using
gigabit ethernet
is a huge drawback (and again, money is the real
issue, so I can't buy a
switch and install nice NICs into the computers for my
own use in those
off hours), but the task at hand won't even allow
propagation beyond 12
computers (hard coded limitation in ORCA). Therefore,
our speedup is
somewhat CPU bound (at night, obviously a
non-dedicated switch during
the day would create really terrible problems since
students are mucking
around on it simultaneously).
I'd like to hear concerns/comments from the community
on this. For
reference I've built the CD based on a slightly
stripped down Gentoo,
but kept it fairly run of the mill so I can use it for
some other
applications afterwards by simply unmerging the
chemistry applications
and reburning it with my new configuration. MPI 1.27
is utilized
because ORCA (again very picky and unfortunately
closed source) requires
it. I've got a small folder of scripts that create
the computer as a
Node or Master with more or less one command. Oh, and
no, IT here is
really, really bad and super Windows friendly.
There's no way they'd
let me install onto another partition.
Feel free to rip away, I know its not a perfect
solution, but I'm not
sure under the heavy money circumstances a better one
exists (please
prove me wrong!).
Ellis
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