[seul-edu] Linux Clusters

[lp <prevettl@cochise.cc.az.us>]

Some news,

The math department at Cochise College has been 
working with two students, Robert Benton and Mike 
Milazzo on a parallel processing experiment for 
ray-tracing using PVM, Povray, and pvmpov. We kept 
records of what we did to configure the cluster
and I'm going to put the documentation in the Math 
Teachers Guide for Linux and the wiki. Parallel
processing and ray-tracing are very exciting
applications that high schools could implement to
demonstrate the utility of Linux.

Here's some links:

http://www.beowulf.org
http://www.cris.com/~rjbono/html/pondermatic.html

They gave their first demo of the project last friday at
a booth at the High School Computer Olympics sponsored
by the computer science department. Many of the people 
there had heard of Linux and clustering but had never 
seen it in action and were very curious about it. There 
were about 200 students and teachers at the event.

Robert brought his computer and showed a presentation   
with 50 ray-traced images and slides explaining the
project. The graphics were backed up with big booming
sound effects and everyone seemed to like it.

Michael handled the ray-tracing demos. There were (5)
AMD K6 400Mhz PCs with 32 to 64 Mb of ram as slaves
in the cluster. We also brought in a 166 Mhz Pentium
PC with 128 Mb of ram for the master. All machines
were running RedHat 6.2 Linux. An image that took
2 minutes and 10 seconds to render on the slower
master could be rendered in about 16 seconds on  
the cluster.

Many questions were answered concerning Linux, 
parallel processing, hardware, software, etc. 
Here are some of Mike and Robs comments:
----

It went great we got some interest from a couple of
local schools, who may be interested in having a cluster
set up. We also were invited to the high-tech show/workshop
that is being co-sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce
and Cochise College. They seemed quite impressed; many
high tech companies are supposed to be there.  The school
is estimating about 40 companies will be there.

''Rob''
-------

Everything went well on Friday. People were quite
impressed. One thing we need to look into a little
more would be load balancing.  PVMPOV would not
spawn tasks on all the computers depending on how many 
tasks you wanted. I found that around 6-8 is ideal for
the chess file.  For the others, I believe 6 is good.  
A teacher from Sierra Vista Middle School wanted to do
something like what we did.  He has lots of older parts,
and he needs to put some new life into them.

''> Did NASA make a job offer?''

I wish NASA was there...  I would have jumped on the 
job immediately!

''Mike''
--------

L. Prevett
Mathematics Instructor
Cochise College, Sierra Vista, AZ, US
prevettl@cochise.cc.az.us