(Illustration by Gaich Muramatsu)
(Illustration by Gaich Muramatsu)
Alinka announces the weekly ALINKA Linux Clustering Letter: clustering_at_alinka.com is a free weekly e-mail newsletter on linux clustering from ALINKA. To subscribe to the list, send e-mail to clustering_at_alinka.com from the address you wish to subscribe, with the word "subscribe" in the subject. To unsubscribe from the list, send e-mail to clustering_at_alinka.com from the address you wish to unsubscribe from, with the word "unsubscribe" in the subject. Alinka is the editor of the ALINKA ORANGES and ALINKA RAISIN administration software for Linux clusters. (Web site: http://www.alinka.com ) clustering_at_alinka.com provides a summary of the weekly activity in mailing-lists relative to linux clustering (such as beowulf, linux virtual server or linux-ha) and general clustering news. Here is the first Alinka Linux Clustering Letter: ====================================================================== ====================================================================== This is the ALINKA Linux Clustering Letter of Wednesday, April the 12th. 2000 News from the High Performance world, by Dr Laurent Gatineau (lgatineau_at_alinka.com) ====================================================================== New Beowulf cluster in the world LosLobos The University of New Mexico [1] and IBM [2] have made a cluster of 256 IBM Netfinity servers (dual processors). We could read in Wired [3] that this cluster will deliver a processing speed of 375 gigaflops, or 375 billion operations per second. It will only rank 24th on the list of the top 500 fastest supercomputers [4]. It's clear that we need good software and good hardware before that clusters could be better than supercomputer. As Dr. Frank Gilfeather said, Beowulf clusters need management tools like on supercomputer, and they need good I/O, including scalable file systems. [1] http://www.unm.edu/ [2] http://www.ibm.com/ [3] http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,35113,00.html [4] http://www.top500.org/ ============= Jet The Forecast Systems Laboratory [1] has made a Beowulf cluster for numerical weather prediction. We could read in the Linux Weekly News [2] that the FSL cluster (called "Jet") currently consists of 276 nodes. Each node is a 667Mhz Alpha processors with 512 Mb of memory. Like for the LosLobos cluster (and lots of Beowulf cluster), the interconnection network used is Myrinet. [1] http://www.fsl.noaa.gov/ [2] http://lwn.net/2000/features/FSLCluster/ ============= Lotus The University of Maine [1] has made a Beowulf cluster of 34 nodes. Each node is based on two 600Mhz Pentium III with 512 Mb of memory and two Fast Ethernet cards. This cluster is available for testing, computational physics and computational physical chemistry. [1] http://weblotus.univ-lemans.fr/w3lotus/index.html Conference about Clustering ============= Extreme Linux Workshop/Conference #3 EL2000 will be held in conjunction with the 4th Annual Linux Showcase & Conference on October 12-14, 2000 in Atlanta, GA. Besides the Extreme Linux track there will be two other refereed tracks: Hack Linux and Use Linux. There will also be vendor exhibits, tutorials, birds of feather sessions, and work in progress sessions. Attendees of the Extreme Linux workshop will be full attendees of the conference and able to attend any sessions they want. http://www.extremelinux.org/activities/usenix00/ http://www.linuxshowcase.org/ Software for Beowulf cluster ============= dsh - distributed shell dsh executes one or more commands on a collection of hosts. The hosts may be specified on the command line or as nodegroups. Commands are executed sequentially on each host, and the output from each command is prepended with the hostname. If a command is not specified on the command line, the user is prompted for commands to execute. From: Beowulf mailing list Home Page: http://www.ccr.buffalo.edu/dsh.htm ============= PVFS Kernel Interface v0.8.1 Allows mounting of PVFS file systems on Linux machines running 2.2.xx kernels (tested on 2.2.12, 2.2.13, 2.2.15pre4). This version no longer requires patching the kernel. From: http://www.beowulf-underground.org/ Home Page: http://www.parl.clemson.edu/pvfs ============= SCMS 1.2 Early Test Version Early version SCMS1.2 beta is now available for testing. If you try and it doesn't work , please report the problem. New feature including: 1. All in Java now. Much better user interface 2. KCAP is now a separate package with many improvement. 3. Realtime monitoring work much better. See [m1] and [m2] for downloading From: the beowulf mailing list [m1] http://www.beowulf.org/listarchives/beowulf/2000/04/0031.html [m2] http://www.beowulf.org/listarchives/beowulf/2000/04/0033.html ============= TCP patches for Red Hat 6.2 Josip Loncaric's TCP patches for Red Hat 6.2 (Linux kernel 2.2.14-5.0) are available. See: Explanation/use: http://www.icase.edu/coral/LinuxTCP2.html Patch for RH6.2: http://www.icase.edu/~josip/tcp-patch-for-2.2.14-5.0 From: the beowulf mailing list [m1] http://www.beowulf.org/listarchives/beowulf/2000/04/0035.html Tips and tricks from the Beowulf mailing list ============= * There was some threads about memory and cluster: how to buy / test / bench it ? A simple conclusion could be: "buy expensive memory and you won't have problems", but it's not always true and Beowulf clusters should use all kind of hardware, so if you could trust in your vendor buy its memory and test it. In fact you should always test your hardware before using it. To test it there is some tools: . the famous memtest86 [1] . Adam Lazur [m1] gives the URL of memtester [2] and said that "he prefers memtester over memtest86 as it has a lot of algo's for finding bad RAM" Another thing about the memory tester, Douglas Eadline [m2] reports that "floating point on x86 hits the RAM espacially hards", he hasn't verified this. An other way to test a node is to make a benchmark of the memory. A good tool for this is stream [3]. By testing the performance of your memory you test also important hardware such as the cache and the bus, and you could test the scalability of SMP nodes. This is the subject of the David Konerding's thread. [1] http://reality.sgi.com/cbrady_denver/memtest86/ [2] http://www.qcc.sk.ca/~charlesc/software/memtester/ [3] http://www.cs.virginia.edu/stream/ [m1] http://www.beowulf.org/listarchives/beowulf/2000/03/0307.html [m2] http://www.beowulf.org/listarchives/beowulf/2000/03/0309.html [m3] http://www.beowulf.org/listarchives/beowulf/2000/03/0286.html * Ole Holm Nielsen had written a Beowulf cluster mini-HowTo, you could find it at this url [1]. Documentations are important: thanks for this work ! [1] http://www.fysik.dtu.dk/CAMP/cluster-howto.html [m1] http://www.beowulf.org/listarchives/beowulf-announce/2000/03/0011.html * Borries Demeler asks for a node cloning software... This is one of the most important tools for a cluster management software (and its fully provides in our software Alinka Raisin). Robert G. Brown [m2] proposes the kickstart installation process from RedHat [1]; dwight [m3] and Pfenniger Daniel [m4] find kickstart very usefull. Alex Lancaster [m5] wrote that one of the limitation of kickstart is that it's not easy to configure software that require human interaction. [1] http://www.redhat.com [m1] http://www.beowulf.org/listarchives/beowulf/2000/03/0274.html [m2] http://www.beowulf.org/listarchives/beowulf/2000/03/0279.html [m3] http://www.beowulf.org/listarchives/beowulf/2000/03/0290.html [m4] http://www.beowulf.org/listarchives/beowulf/2000/03/0295.html [m5] http://www.beowulf.org/listarchives/beowulf/2000/04/0023.html * Alexander Korenkov [m1] seeks for some tricks to tune his MPI: with his 100 Mbit fast Ethernet his net speed is only about 7.2 Mbit /s. According to the description of his algorithm, the best answer should be the Jeff Squyres's one [m2]: "use the persistent mode sends and receives". He gives a good description on the cost to send a message: you have to take into account the cost to go through the system and the cost to go through the network (the first one could be very expensive when you send lots of small messages). [m1] http://www.beowulf.org/listarchives/beowulf/2000/04/0002.html [m2] http://www.beowulf.org/listarchives/beowulf/2000/04/0003.html * Jose Marin [m1] asks for a network traffic monitor. There's lots of network meter, some does lots of thing, other are lightweight... Robert G. Brown [m2] had wrote procstatd [1] and give a pointer [m3] to mgm [3] which is probably not for professional using. Jose Marin answers himself and gives a pointer to an SGI's tool (Performance Co-Pilot) [2] which monitor all system ressources, and two other pointers [4], [5] for the tools iptraf and ntop which are recommended by Jay Sherman, Felix Rauch [m4]. Two others tools were cited by Lyle Bickley and Paul Nowoczynski: ethertape [6] and Ethereal [7] (which is a network protocol analyzer). [1] http://www.phy.duke.edu/brahma/ [2] http://oss.sgi.com/projects/pcp/ [3] http://www.xiph.org/mgm/ [4] http://cebu.mozcom.com/riker/iptraf/ [5] http://www.ntop.org/ [6] http://etherape.sourceforge.net/download.html [7] http://ethereal.zing.org/ [m1] http://www.beowulf.org/listarchives/beowulf/2000/04/0036.html [m2] http://www.beowulf.org/listarchives/beowulf/2000/04/0038.html [m3] http://www.beowulf.org/listarchives/beowulf/2000/04/0045.html [m4] http://www.beowulf.org/listarchives/beowulf/2000/04/0040.html * Kragen Sitaker [m1] wants to change the bios of all his nodes without doing it by hand. Erik Arjan Hendriks [m2] gives a solution with the tool Bios Writer [1]. [1] http://sourceforge.net/project/?group_id=2965 [m1] http://www.beowulf.org/listarchives/beowulf/2000/04/0058.html [m2] http://www.beowulf.org/listarchives/beowulf/2000/04/0059.html * J.Dube [m1] wants to know if "a Beowulf on an outside connection is a huge security hole". A short answer could be that a Beowulf is like one computer, so it's no more no less a security hole than to put a computer on an outside connection... It depends on how the Beowulf is configured. Robert G. Brown [m2] wrote a long mail explaining how the Beowulf could be configured to close the maximum of security holes, and dwight [m3] added some comments. [m1] http://www.beowulf.org/listarchives/beowulf/2000/04/0030.html [m2] http://www.beowulf.org/listarchives/beowulf/2000/04/0032.html [m3] http://www.beowulf.org/listarchives/beowulf/2000/04/0052.html News from the High Availability world, by Christophe Massiot (cmassiot_at_alinka.com) ====================================================================== LVS === * Jean-Christophe Boggio describes [lvs1] a solution for having load balancing with MySQL. The application must separate read queries from write queries, read queries are dispatched normally through lvs, and write queries are done as many times as there are SQL servers at the application level. Sean Ward has developed such a solution which reads log files for replication [lvs2]. The source code is currently available [lvs3]. * Phil Z. sends in a report [lvs4] on Realnetworks G2 server. To have it work under LVS, the audio/video daemon must be configured to listen/respond to both the VIP and its real IP, and both port 7070 and 554 must be redirected. * Using LVS for balancing smtp servers should work, provided you do not have ident loops with multiple smtp servers. To avoid this, turn on the -R option of tcpserver (qmail/tcpserver) [lvs5], or read the HOWTO for sendmail [lvs6]. POP will only work if you have an NFS-safe POP server [lvs7]. * RedHat creates a new mailing-list for piranha, a web interface for Linux clustering. [lvs8] * IPVS patch 0.9.10 is out. Here is the ChangeLog : * Julian added the droprate and secure_tcp defense strategies. * The dropentry defense strategy was revisited. * The fwmark service lookup was added by Horms, Julian and Wensong Use a firewall-marking to denote a virtual service instead of a triplet <protocol,addr,port>. The marking of packets with a firewall-mark is done by firewalling code. This feature can be used to build a virtual service assoicated to different IP addresses or port numbers, but sharing the same real servers, such as multiple-homed LVS. [lvs9] * A document on LVS defense strategies against DOS attack is available. [lvs10] [lvs1] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-virtual-server&m=95484927402602&w=2 [lvs2] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-virtual-server&m=95486218014132&w=2 [lvs3] http://lsdproject.sourceforge.net [lvs4] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-virtual-server&m=95486498617326&w=2 [lvs5] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-virtual-server&m=95496469906008&w=2 [lvs6] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-virtual-server&m=95404893314823&w=2 [lvs7] http://www.clubi.ie/%7eross/sendmail-maildir.html [lvs8] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-virtual-server&m=95503184623136&w=2 [lvs9] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-virtual-server&m=95528038608970&w=2 [lvs10] http://www.LinuxVirtualServer.org/defense.html Linux-HA ======== * Legato has released a clustering solution called Legato Cluster Enterprise. It supports Solaris, Linux (RedHat, Caldera), Windows NT/2000, HP-UX and AIX platforms. [lha1] * Mike Wangsmo has released kernels with ext3 patches for testing purposes only. [lha2] [lha1] http://www.legato.com/News/pr00031index.html [lha2] ftp://people.redhat.com/wanger/clustering/ext3 LinuxFailSafe ============= * Chris Wright summarizes the status of LinuxFailSafe [lfs1]. The port to Linux is well under way, and being done largerly by SGI (release date in the summer ?). The intent is to open source almost all of FailSafe, with a licence near GPL/LGPL. * The presentations made by SGI at the Linux FailSafe Symposium at Denver on 31st March are now available. [lfs2] [lfs1] http://lists.tummy.com/pipermail/linuxfailsafe/2000-April/000011.html [lfs2] http://oss.sgi.com/projects/failsafe/ News on the Filesystems front, by Ludovic Ishiomin (lishiomin_at_alinka.com) ====================================================================== In [1m], someone asks if intermezzo could be used for filesystem replication, in order to achieve high availability. The answer is that intermezzo can handle this job, but it's not ready yet for critical tasks. JFS 0.0.5 for Linux, a well known journaled filesystem which comes from IBM AIX, has been announced. More information can be found at [1]. But it is not yet ready for a public release. In the linux-lvm mailing list, there had been a discussion about the ability to convert an existing filesystem into a logical volume. The conclusion is that it should be possible, but some code is needed in the ext2resize utility. [1m] http://www.inter-mezzo.org/list-archives/intermezzo-discuss/msg00007.html [1] http://oss.software.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/jfs/index.html ====================================================================== This letter was brought to you by ALINKA (http://www.alinka.com), the editor of the ALINKA ORANGES and ALINKA RAISIN administration software for Linux clusters. -- abrenner_at_alinka.com http://www.alinka.com; AlinkA : Cluster Solutions Tel: (+33) 1 49 35 29 29Received on 2000-04-12 15:07:30