GridCD
I am doing some investigation into a Morphix (read Knoppix) based Grid CD
which could be used to rapidly boot up a machine into a WN. The idea would
be to allow us (Oxford) to turn the piles of highly speced desktop machines
quickly into WNs for overnight, holiday, and weekend operation. Jobs still
running when the user returned would be killed (not so nice), unless I can
come up with some better way for PBS to manage this.
For example, I have a P4 1.8 GHz, with 40 gigs HD space (37 gigs free), and
400 megs of RAM. My office is filled with these. They are used for email,
web browsing, and ssh sessions. That leads to:
GridVM
The other idea is to use VMWare or Bochs to run an emulator with the EDG
software running on it as a WN. This would have much lower performance (but
still would probably be useful), but would start up more quickly, and would
be easier to "turn off" when the regular user returns (by lowering the
priority on the task). Again, the objective is to make use of the
significant number of machines which probably average a 1% CPU load.
If anyone has any comments or ideas about these, I'd be interested to hear.
Ian.
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Ian Stokes-Rees [log in to unmask]
Particle Physics, Oxford http://www-pnp.physics.ox.ac.uk/~stokes/
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