BSDCon photos available - HPC Clustering talk

drhodus at catpa.com drhodus at catpa.com
Thu Sep 11 08:05:11 PDT 2003


Quoting David Leimbach <leimy2k at xxxxxxx>:

> Matt,
Well, I'm not Matt, but I'll reply. :-0
> 
> Just out of curiosity, and the deep desire to get my boss
> to let us release a FreeBSD version of our MPI products :),
> who gave the presentation on HPC clustering from The
> Aerospace Corporation?
There were a number of names on the list for this talk, though
only Book Davis did any talking. As for any actual release 
of anything, that didn't happen. 
As mainly just the advocation to use BSD
on a cluster environment. In my experience I wouldn't
use any other thing. As I spent a week at extend the
binary action class to support PA 2 binaries so we didn't
have to go down the path of a HP Super Dom cluster at a
pervious employer. As for software that Book is using, that
was acquired via opensource projects that a geared towards
the linux community. Or the actual computational program was
a commercial linux product that they run under FreeBSD because
of the image activation. 

The talk was for the most part about sys admin type of headaches
you "could" encounter. I was also disappointed when the use of the
linux emulation was used during the talk. We don't have linux emulation
code and never will. There is nothing to emulate, it just runs like
everything just with a small number of #if 's for some syscall hooks
and other trivial items. The end factor you end up able to execute a
program that was compiled for linux cleaner and faster on BSD. This
is further backed by the computer graphics rendering that was done
for the Matrix movie. Because Render Man ran more efficient on FreeBSD
because of our much clean VM system, they rendered the movie on
a small number of FreeBSD machines. There was no emulation involved. :-)
Um, not time for some really expensive California breakfast....


-DR

Sorry for the line wrap, as this webmail is very odd, sometimes
like lastnight it likes to send 2 emails out....

> 
> For a while there were Myrinet drivers for FreeBSD and
> possibly others but I haven't seen any of the Infiniband folks
> port the VAPI drivers to any BSD OS except perhaps Mac OS X
> on the G5 for Virginia Tech.
> 
> Dave
> On Sep 10, 2003, at 10:31 PM, Matthew Dillon wrote:
> 
> >     http://apollo.backplane.com/BSDCON2003/
> >
> > 					-Matt





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