Using a cluster for DC

[Eleron]

Can a Beowulf cluster, since it runs linux, be used in one of the DC projects out there?

 

[Confused]

Welcome to the DC forum 🙂

You may wish to look at Distributed Folding. The AnandTech team is quite small, so you will really run up the ranks quickly! 🙂 The client is downloadable from here, and as shown in Text client readme:

Running Non-interactively or on a Cluster
-----------------------------------------
You may wish to run the client in a mode requiring absolutely no user
interaction. This is especially convenient if you want to run it on, for
example, a Beowulf Cluster. For your convenience we have made it easy to do
so. See also the section above on "Non-interactive auto-update".

To run on a cluster computer (and we encourage you to do so if you have
access to such a machine):

1. Decompress the package on one node as described above, and add proxy
information as described above if necessary. Then, create a text file
called "handle.txt". It should contain a single line with your 8-character
handle you received upon registration. Save it in the same directory as
the other files.

1a. Edit the foldit script and add "-qt" (without the quotes) to the end of
the line containing "foldtrajlite -f protein -n native". This supresses all
program output.

1b. Try running the client on the node to ensure it starts without any input
from you. If any updates are available, for example, you will have to
give it permission to download and install them. Once you have ensured your
client is up to date, proceed to step 2.

2. Now distribute the directory to the other nodes of your cluster (presumably
you have some script(s) to efficiently do this). Each node will need a
complete copy of the client software.

3. Now start the "foldit" script on each machine (again, you presumably have
some scripts to do this efficiently. It will run until you stop it as
described in step 4, or until a mandatory update is released (in which case
it will NOT be automatically installed, the client will simply exit once you
have performed step 4; you must then manually run the client on a node, give
permission to install the update, and then go back to step 2).

4. To halt the screensaver on one or all the nodes, simply delete the file
"foldtrajlite.lock" which will be found in the same directory as all the other
files. The program will complete the structure it is working on, upload any
remaining data to our server, and then terminate gracefully (could take up
to two minutes depending on your connection and how much data needs to be
uploaded, so please be patient).

I'm not sure how well this would work. You can also check out the client downloads as listed in one of these threads for Linux clients and see how well they would do 🙂

Good luck with getting this done, and i'm sure somebody with better Linux/clustering experience will be along soon 🙂 But i'll provide you with some reading to start you off 🙂

Confused

 

[IJump]

The KLAT2 has run RC5 before....and quite well......

 

[PeterN]

You're talking about a Beowulf?

Who, what, where, when, how big, or in short: Tell us all about this wonderfull machine. 😀

 

[Eleron]

We are building a 25 node cluster running on susie linux with skyld as the server. The initial cluster nodes will be running on 233Mhz with 16 mb RAM on each node.

 

[raven42]

We have built a 5 node cluster using 850 gateways and have a 25 node cluster cluster using 166 compaqs. Is there a good demo and and benchmark program out there?