From: Alexandre P. N. <al...@om...> - 2005-11-22 22:47:04
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Craig Hughes escreveu: > [cut] > Well, I think my main idea initially was to provide some publically > accessible compile farms for building stuff to run on gumstix. That > is, allow native compilation at reasonable speeds (using distcc/ > ccache) for stuff which can't be cross-compiled in the buildroot due > to "issues" with the upstream package. For example stuff like the > perl build really wants to run natively on the machine it's being > compiled for. You can kind of get miniperl to compile with a cross- > compiler, but it's not easy, and miniperl ain't perl. I gave up > entirely on trying to get PHP to cross compile, though I compiled it > natively on a gumstix using an NFS mounted root_fs, and that worked > nicely (but took a long time). > So I'm not that off the road :-) > But that's not by any means the only thing one could do with a > gumstix cluster (gumwad?). The intention is basically to provide the > hardware out there to help people potentially come up with great > ideas. I think the main advantage to a gumstix cluster vs any other > kind of cluster, if there is one, is the power consumption. a 6-node > gumstix+netstix cluster will have about 2.4GHz of (integer) > processing power, but only draw about 12 watts of power. By > contrast, your typical single-CPU desktop will probably be drawing > somewhere in the 100-200 watt range. 6 gumstix+netstix also fits in > about 1/50th of the space of a 1U rackmount enclosure, if you arrange > them nicely. I think if one thinks about power supply issues > carefully, you could probably fit 300 or 400 gumstix into a 1U > enclosure, for about 120-160GHz of CPU, though to do that you'd > probably want to not use the etherstix, but do something a bit > smarter by interconnecting the busses of the PXAs more directly. > That SMC ethernet controller chip sucks a ton of power, and seems to > turn most of what it draws into heat... Wow. I can't even think about a 160ghz cluster. I'll have dreams about that tonight! > > As for what I'll be sending to each of these 3 sites, I haven't > completely made up my mind yet (gotta keep some surprises back), but > it'll probably be something like: > > 6 connex-400xm > 6 netMMC > 1 connex-200 > 1 netDUO > cables, power bricks, etc as makes sense > > The idea would be that the connex200+netDUO could be used as an > access control system to the cluster. The site will need to provide > a >=7 port hub or switch as a backbone, but I suspect each of the 3 > sites probably has some spare network ports lying around which could > be used. We'll figure out how to do shared storage among the boxes, > but right now I'm thinking that it ought to be relatively easy to do > something like export the MMC drives from each of the 6 machines as > linux network block devices, then use software RAID over those block > devices or something. Anyway, I'm sure we'll come up with a bright > idea there. > This is great, one more gumstix with a netduo will do a great firewall :-) About shared storage, I guess something as weird as "sshfs" would do the trick. And I maybe wrong :-) Alexandre |