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Comment by xattt | Hacker News Reader

But does anyone remember the Beowulf trope(1) from Slashdot? Am I a greybeard now?

(1) https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/01/07/14/0748215/can-you...

So, I once met a guy named Don.

We were hanging out in the garage of a mutual friend, chatting. Got to the "what do you do" section of the conversation, and he says he works in massively parallel stuff at XYZ corp. Something something, GPUs.

I make the obvious "can you make a Beowulf cluster?" joke, to which he responds (after a pregnant pause), "you... do know who I am?"

Yep. Donald Becker. A slightly awkward moment, I'll cherish forever.

Ew. "Do you have any idea who I am?" is never a good look.

I like user big.ears' speculation on what someone could possibly do with that much parallel compute:

  I don't think there's any theoretical reason someone couldn't build a fairly realistic highly-complex "brain" using, say, 100,000,000 simplified neural units (I've heard of a guy in Japan who is doing such a thing), but I don't really know what it would do, or if it would teach us anything that is interesting.

Simplified neural unit? Less capacity than a human brain? Lame.

Lame, that just gives the opportunity to release for a higher price the Neural Unit Pro, Neural Unit Max, and Neural Unit ProMax. You consider it lame because you're acumen in business nuance is lame ;-)

You and me both. The funny thing is, I wound up writing a program that would benefit from clustering, and felt my way around setting up MPICH on my zoo. I laughed out loud when I realized that, after all these years, I'd built an impromptu Beowulf cluster, even though the machines are scattered around the house.

Installing MPICH from source instead of from your distribution is best if you can't have all your cluster members running the same version of the same distro and/or have multiple architectures to contend with. But it takes forever to compile, even on a fast machine.

well since you already have a cluster you could distcc the compilation. I remember doing that on a bunch of machines when we were building gentoo

That's more a COW, than a (Beo)wulf, no?

<https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/high-performance-linux/...>

A cluster of workstations (COW) is usually opportunistic exploiting existing systems, and lower density than a dedicated (usually rack-based or datacentre-based) cluster.

In practice, COWs usually turn out to be not especially useful, though there are exceptions.

To go along with "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!", don't forget "Take my money!"

You can get off my lawn now.

It remember building a 4 node Beowulf cluster out of discarded compaq desktops and then having no idea what to do with it.

75mhz, yeah! Stacked on top of each other! With 10mbit ethernet! I think we got OpenMosix going even.

But then 5 years later I was working on them for a living in HPC, but they were no longer called Beowulf Clusters then.

Did kinda the same thing but with Raspberry Pis. Neat, a cluster of r-pi's... now what?

If you want to continue the chain of specific goals in service of no specific purpose: run Kubernetes on it.

Then add ArgoCD for deployment and istio for a service mesh!

While you are at it, also setup Longhorn for storage. With that solved, you might as well start hosting Gitea and DroneCI on the cluster, plus an extra helm- and docker repo for good measure. And in no time you will have a full modern CI/CD setup to do nothing but updates on! :-)

Seriously, though, you will learn a lot of things in the process and get a bottom up view of current stacks, which is definitely helpful.

I did this. I am still dead inside. Thank goodness all my production shit has a managed control plane and network.

Alternatively, if you dont like the kube's learn yourself some erlang, and make a super fault tolerant application.

Step 1: run a page ranking algorithm using Naive Bayes on a bastardised HPC framework

Step 2: add advertising

Step 3: make more money than God.

Natalie Portman says yes, and instructs you to put some hot grits down your pants.

I do and you are. I’m also imagining one covered in hot grits…

Beowulf clusters were those lame things that didn’t have wireless, and had less space than a nomad, right?

Don't forget the Hot Grits & Natalie Portman.

I do but in all fairness, I have an entirely grey beard.

Grey! Mine is white.

I do. And cool research OSes that did process migration.

Ah, Plan 9.

I'm not sure that Plan 9 does process migration out of the box. It does have complete "containerization" by default, i.e. user-controlled namespacing of all OS resources - so snapshotting and migration could be a feasible addition to it.

Distributed shared memory is another intriguing possibility, particularly since large address spaces are now basically ubiquitous. It would allow users to seamlessly extend multi-threaded workloads to run on a cluster; the OS would essentially have to implement memory-coherence protocols over the network.

If not Plan 9, then likely Inferno. (A pretty different system, of course.)

And God help us, OS2/Warp.

With much better tooling for OO ABI than COM/WinRT will ever get (SOM).

It's too bad Apple never bought Gerry Popek's LOCUS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOCUS), which could do process migration between heterogeneous hardware!

Sure do! It is interesting that these technologies evolve more slowly than it seems, sometimes.

On the graybearding of the cohort, here’s a weird one to me. These days, I mention slashdot and get more of a response from peers than mentioning digg!

In 2005, I totally thought digg would be around forever as the slashdot successor, but it’s almost like it never happened (to software professionals… er, graybeards)

New to me - found the source article in the Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20010715201416/http://www.scient...

Found the definition:

Sterling and his Goddard colleague Donald J. Becker connected 16 PCs, each containing an Intel 486 microprocessor, using Linux and a standard Ethernet network. For scientific applications, the PC cluster delivered sustained performance of 70 megaflops--that is, 70 million floating-point operations per second. Though modest by today's standards, this speed was not much lower than that of some smaller commercial supercomputers available at the time. And the cluster was built for only $40,000, or about one tenth the price of a comparable commercial machine in 1994.

NASA researchers named their cluster Beowulf, after the lean, mean hero of medieval legend who defeated the giant monster Grendel by ripping off one of the creature's arms. Since then, the name has been widely adopted to refer to any low-cost cluster constructed from commercially available PCs.

yeah, wanted to replicate something like that by proposing a hardware vendor who visited my uni. decades ago. didn't go nowhere because i was intimidated by the red-tapes.

But does it run Doom?

Crysis

What does Natalie Portman need to imagine a Beowulf cluster of Dooms running Crysis? Grits?

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