Linux Cluster

openMosix is a Linux kernel extension for single-system image clustering. Taking n PC boxes, openMosix gives users and applications the illusion of one single computer with n CPUs. openMosix is perfectly scalable and adaptive.

Linux Cluster Manager 2.20 released. LCM is a graphical tool for monitoring and managing multiple Linux systems from a central location. Features include real time monitoring and status information, remote command execution, and a range of imaging features.

In computing, virtualization is the process of presenting a logical grouping of computing resources so that they can be accessed in ways that give benefits over the original configuration. This new virtual view of the resources is not restricted by the implementation, geographic location or the physical configuration of underlying resources. Commonly virtualized resources include computing power and data storage.

A good example of virtualization is modern symmetric multiprocessing computer architectures that contain more than one CPU. Operating systems are usually configured in such a way that the multiple CPUs can be presented as a single processing unit. Thus software applications can be written for a single logical (virtual) processing unit, which is much simpler than having to work with a large number of different processor configurations.

Xen 3.0 is the first major release of Xen since the October 2004 release of Xen 2.0, which saw significant deployment in ASP, retail, hosting and development and testing environments. The 3.0 release delivers a feature set needed by large enterprises seeking to adopt virtualization in the data center, to realize the benefits of increased server utilization, server consolidation, servers and no-downtime maintenance.

The Xen 3.0 release has several key components that advocates of Linux and open source software (OSS) find appealing, including support for up to 32-way SMP virtualized guests and the ability to hot plug CPUs to ensure the most efficient use of resources.

The dawn of high-performance computing came in the 1970s with the development of the Cray 1 and other custom-built supercomputers running proprietary operating systems. The early 1990s saw the use of semi-custom microprocessor supercomputers, running Unix on clustered RISC platforms. A milestone was reached in 1997, when the TOP500 list, a biannual listing of the world's most powerful supercomputers, first included cluster systems. Clusters are now in the top 30, and in the next TOP500 list,due out next month,clusters are expected to dominate the top 10.

Clusters running the open-source Linux OS offer a wide range of benefits over traditional supercomputers. Besides sporting a lower purchase price, Linux clusters are often less expensive to operate, said Dr. Mark Seager, assistant department head for terascale systems at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., which purchased a 1,152-server cluster from Sandy, Utah-based integrator Linux NetworX. Seager estimated that the cost to power and cool the cluster will be half that of a comparable supercomputer.

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The Indian government-run Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has designed a parallel-processing 1 TFLOP (trillion floating point operations per second) supercomputer, scalable up to 16 TFLOPs and available on a build-to-order basis. Read the entire article here.

Linux will be the main operating system for IBM's upcoming family of "Blue Gene" supercomputers--a major endorsement for the operating system and the open-source computing model it represents.

IBM%apos;s $100 million Blue Gene program is directed at creating, by late 2005 or early 2006, a new family of supercomputers that will be able to perform a quadrillion calculations per second (one petaflop).

Blue Gene/L, the first member of the family, will contain 65,000 processors and 16 trillion bytes of memory. Due in 2004 or 2005, the system will be able to perform 200 trillion calculations per second. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will use the system for performing nuclear weapons simulations.

The IBM research team is currently running a large Linux cluster to simulate Blue Gene.