Planet SoC

Well, echoing the posts of my fellow gsocers; the google summer of code has ended and my plans for the future might not be as murky as I initially expected. Its been 3 months since we were required to turn in our code samples, and ever since I have moved on to 3 new exciting projects. I will provide more in-depth information about my new engagements in my next blog post. For now here are some information and resources relating to my google summer of code project:

(GSoC update)
After about 3 weeks of coding I am elated to announce the completion of the gathering subsystem in the OSCAR Monitoring framework. The first plugin that made use of the framework was written and successfully updated the monitoring database with data. This plugin makes use of the Round Robin Database created and managed by ganglia
For those not familiar with my project here is a description of the goals of the project and here are the milestones achieved so far:
1. Definition of Schemas and familiarity with the OSCAR code base.
2. Successful implementation of the framework core(Interface to OSCAR Database).
3.  Extension of the core framework to the gathering subsystem.

Benefits to OSCAR:
OSCAR is no doubt very popular as a cluster manager in HPC environments. This comes as no surprise when its high configurability and flexibility with regards to supported linux distributions is taken into account. Alas, installing a cluster resource manager is only the first step in managing a cluster; initiatives have to be employed to ensure that individual nodes in the cluster are somewhat resilient to failures. Incorporating a framework that allows monitoring of services running on the various nodes and storage of the information gathered using the OSCAR database will ensure a more robust OSCAR.

The monitoring framework is divided into 3 distinct parts:

1. Gathering Subsystem

2. Action Subsystem

3. Driver

Its been a month since I received the morale diminishing news from Stanford, what have I done so far?
First I was accepted into the google summer of code program to implement a high level generic monitoring
framework also we successfully illustrated a prototype of our robot in the robotics competition.
If the phrase a journey of “a thousand miles begins with one step” is any consolation for the tumultuous nature life’s pathways to success are I can justly say thats one big step I’ve taken.
Lesson learnt from my most recent experiences seem to reinstate the notion that giving up on goals, aspirations or dreams in time of failure can only be an indication of weakness but rather cultivating a persistent approach no matter how grand or seemly impossible it might initially be can unlock unseen opportunities .
In my next post, I will discuss my work so far on the google project!

 
Sorry if you expected this page to be full of praises for the apple operating system. Without digressing I will state what is obvious to any rational, open minded person that has not being influenced by any “fan boyism” .
The best damn svn client for mac is SyncroSVNClient period!

The only drawback is its non-free nature. After looking at most available svn clients for mac I came to this conclusion. Ironically, macs are renowned for their ease of use and programmer friendly environment yet the only svn client worth mentioning is one that does not include half the functionality of tortise svn in windows. I find this disturbing.

I place my fingers on my keyboard and try to put my otherwise chaotic thoughts on screen but nothing is forthcoming. What could the matter be? Am I suffering a case of writers block? or could it be that my thoughts are meaningless and their entropic state is simply a reflection of my dreams; unpredictable and disorganized.

I don’t know why I am making this post at 3:00am when I should be sleeping..well, the quarter is drawing to an end and all looking back I can describe it with one word “Edutainment” (quotes needed). “Edu” is from the word education meaning this quarter has been highly informative. I learnt quite a lot of things ranging from what makes the internet work(routing) in networking to what makes a super computer super in high performance computing. The “tainment” part of course refers to how interesting and mostly fun it has been for me. I wrote programs showing how routing algorithms such as RIP and OSPF work, programs the are highly scalable running on our 32 node cluster and even programs that make use of highly parallelized and specialized hardware clusters like the Nvidia General Purpose GPU and Playstation 3.

During the course of taking the HPC class in my school, we were required to write different research papers depending on what research project you were assigned to do. Since I was assigned the task of removing several OSCAR dependencies in HA-OSCAR and re-integrating these into its core, making it a complete HA solution for any cluster or server platform , it was only natural to have been assigned the task of review it against some other prominent HA solutions. A link to the paper and power point presentation is here.

In this post I will explain how to install a highly available server or in other words servers with a downtime of barely 0.001%. Computers crash sooner or later either due to some faulty component or as a result of a software bug, this tutorial will show how a simple server can be made nearly indestructible while costing near to nothing in requirement for technical knowledge.
The program I’ll use is HA-OSCAR, well simply because its free, open source, and lastly I know everything about it!
Ensure you get the following ready:
1. You have access to two computers that will be used as servers.
2. You are running at least CentOS4 or above.
Note: Portions of this tutorial in red text means it applies only to installation on a Rocks Cluster.

With the recent purchase of twenty one Playstation 3 console by my school, we were allowed to run programs (via linux) to make use of the massive computational potentials of it. Naturally, we wanted to find if it lived to the 204 billion floating point operations (Gigaflop) IBM claims it is capable of. The following charts show the results of various tests run on the PS3 by a third party and our own matrix computation tests in which matrices of sizes ranging from 100 to 100,000 was calculated:

With the recent purchase of twenty one Playstation 3 console by my school, we were allowed to run programs (via linux) to make use of the massive computational potentials of it. Naturally, we wanted to find if it lived to the 204 billion floating point operations (Gigaflop) IBM claims it is capable of. The following charts show the results of various tests run on the PS3 by a third party and our own matrix computation tests in which matrices of sizes ranging from 100 to 100,000 was calculated:

With the recent purchase of twenty one Playstation 3 console by my school, we were allowed to run programs (via linux) to make use of the massive computational potentials of it. Naturally, we wanted to find if it lived to the 204 billion floating point operations (Gigaflop) IBM claims it is capable of. The following charts show the results of various tests run on the PS3 by a third party and our own matrix computation tests in which matrices of sizes ranging from 100 to 100,000 was calculated:

In order to install HA-OSCAR, you must first download the three (3) necessary packages from the XCR group site.
1. haoscar-repo-common-rpms.tar.gz
2. haoscar-repo-DISTRO-VER-ARCH-1.3.tar.gz
3. haoscar1.3.tar.gz

Create a directory “/tftpboot/ha/ ” and copy the haoscar-repo-* files to this directory and extract.
Create a directory “/tftpboot/rpm” and copy all rpms present on the installation media into this directory.
Extract the haoscar1.3.tar.gz file in whatever directory it is stored and run the installation script.

In this post I will discuss my recent experiences with the open source community in the form of HA-OSCAR application. I was charged with the task of removing the OSCAR dependency in HA-OSCAR, thus making it a true high availability software.
With the world going for greener sources of energy and technology driving this green/renewable sources of energy immature, high performance computing(HPC) projects can be very high priced. Today’s HPC Projects take the form of massive data-centers which employ thousands or servers. PC World magazine in their December edition compares the power consumption of all the data centers to the whole state of Mississippi. With this cost ever increasing, a solution for running a low cost and low energy data center had to be implemented. This solution came in the form of clustering.

Introduction
This document outlines configuring Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) on your Sony VGN Series. Most items will work out of the box and a base install should provide you with a completely working system. Due to the modular nature of the VGN series there are many different configuration, please read carefully and only make the changes specific to your system.
Installation Notes

• § If booting with the live CD gives you a blank screen you should select the “Safe Graphics” menu choice.

Display/Video
Accelerated Video and Desktop Effects
Intel 2D and 3D accelerated video work out of the box.

MPLAB Setup
MPLAB is Microchips Integrated Development Environment. It can be download directly from Microchips MLAPB Site.
If you are using CCS‘ C-Compiler, make sure to run their MPLAB integration tool, otherwise the PIC Compiler will not work. The MPLAB integration tool for MPLAB version 6.xx will work for MPLAB v. 7.00.
After the installation you will find the highlighted tool suite (under Project select Set Language Tool Locations). Make sure to use this one. Do not use CCS C Compiler or you will get ‘BUILD FAILED’ after compiling and downloading the HEX file will not work.)

MPLAB Setup
MPLAB is Microchips Integrated Development Environment. It can be download directly from Microchips MLAPB Site.
If you are using CCS‘ C-Compiler, make sure to run their MPLAB integration tool, otherwise the PIC Compiler will not work. The MPLAB integration tool for MPLAB version 6.xx will work for MPLAB v. 7.00.
After the installation you will find the highlighted tool suite (under Project select Set Language Tool Locations). Make sure to use this one. Do not use CCS C Compiler or you will get ‘BUILD FAILED’ after compiling and downloading the HEX file will not work.)