[Malvern] DIY Clusters - Microwulf

[Ian Pascoe]

Andy

As promised last night.


 * Microwulf (Tiny Supercomputer) runs Ubuntu - In January 2007, two
of us (professor Joel Adams and student Tim Brom) decided to build a
personal, portable Beowulf cluster. Like a personal computer, the cost
had to be low -- our budget was $2500 -- and its size had to be small
enough to sit on a person's desk. For various reasons, we have been a
Gentoo shop for a while. So it would seem fairly obvious that we would
use Gentoo. But over time we had found Gentoo to be something of an
administrative hassle. Since we wanted to keep Microwulf relatively
simple (as simple as possible but not overly simple). and we had
experience with Ubuntu, we decided to give that a try first. We
installed Ubuntu Desktop on the head node. We used Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy)
as it was the latest stable release of Ubuntu at the time. It had a
2.6.17 kernel. It was a very easy installation except for one thing -
the driver for the on-board NIC was not included in the kernel until
2.6.18. So for the first two months of Microwulf's young life, we used
an alpha version of Ubuntu 7.04 (Fiesty) with had a 2.6.20 kernel and
the drivers that we needed. 7.04 finally went stable in April, but we
never had any trouble with the alpha version.
http://www.clustermonkey.net/content/view/211/1/1/0/ (see
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-marketing-submissions/2007-Septembe
r/000079.html)

Ian