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My Other Computer Is a Supercomputer

Issue 115

From Issue #115
November 2003

Nov 01, 2003  By Steve Jones
 in
Steve Jones started taking notes on PBS, MPI and MOSIX in November 2002, and by June 2003 he was manager of a cluster on the TOP500 list. Here's how the Rocks distribution can help cluster managers get systems up and running.
Final Observations

The right mix of an infrastructure person and researchers who actually run jobs on the cluster managing the system, along with empowering interested users in different labs that utilize the system, has been the key to keeping costs at a minimum for maintaining Iceberg. We have delegated tasks now so that firewall management, scheduler configuration, user administration, hardware maintenance and general cluster administration tasks are consuming only a small amount of any person's time. The average time spent administering is an hour a week. This speaks to the design of the system and the choices made in keeping the total cost of ownership of a 302-node supercomputer at the same price as ten nodes.

Steve Jones (stevejones@stanford.edu) left his position at the Stanford Law School in order to pursue a position as a security strategist for an Internet service provider, while consulting for a security startup. He's in the process of moving to Maine where he'll be working as the strategist for another school and starting yet another company. In his spare time, he'll also be managing a 302-node cluster dubbed Iceberg.

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