grid geekery

[trochee]

for the geeks who may be reading:

Does anybody know anything about grid computing? Our lab has been limping along for years with pmake, but it's really not scaling well. We're looking into moving to another system of grid computing to make it easier to work with -- ideally a CPU-scavenging architecture.

Our current favorite (well, my current favorite) seems to be Condor, with the Sun Grid Engine being a second runner-up. PBS (no, not PBS) has also been suggested, but I'm not at all convinced about its support -- it seems to have moved to closed-source.

My question for any of you: have you used any of these? Was it difficult? Would you recommend it? We have an unwieldy cluster of some 200 nodes (with ~300 CPUs among them) and a small number of master fileservers that share a common NFS space. It would be neat to include some of the features of the Condor supersystem, but that's not really critical. What is critical is that we need to move our lab to a system that is supported by somebody outside our lab: we're a speech lab, not a parallel computing lab. We don't have the time or expertise to build clever parallel computing architectures. We'd love to leave it to the experts -- and to be able to file a bug that other people will get their degrees by fixing.

Any advice? Quite honestly, I'm not really expecting any responses, but who knows who's paying attention out there? Who's doing high-throughput, parallel computing on many nodes? evan? xaosenkosmos? (evan, don't say "google filesystem", unless they want to share with us! )

Comments

[apollinax.livejournal.com]

When interviewing at UW, I chatted with the Condor folks. Those people know what they're doing: they've been doing it for a long, long time, and a lot of influential people with good taste use their system. I'd recommend it highly. That being said, I've never tried using it, so take my recommendation with a big grain o' salt.

[trochee.livejournal.com]

your opinion of the Condor people mirrors my own, except you have some personal contact as well.

which influential people with good taste did you have in mind?

Interesting Condor users.

[alan-de-smet.livejournal.com]

It's an old post, but no one answered, so I thought I would, just in case you still care. I'm Condor staff, so I'm biased, but anyway. The Hartford (http://www.thehartford.com/), an insurance company, is using Condor for their processing needs (http://www.insurancetech.com/story/?articleID=55801230). (The Hartford's PowerPoint presentation from our conference this last spring (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/CondorWeek2005/presentations/nordlund_hartford.ppt).) C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures (http://www.coredp.com/) uses Condor for their rendering farm used for special effects in movies. (CORE's PPT presentation (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/CondorWeek2005/presentations/stowe_core.ppt). I believe they said at our conference that everything on their current demo reel (http://www.coredp.com/reels/sr_core_toon_reel/?&w=1270&h=968) was using Condor to manage their rendering workload.) Micron (http://www.micron.com/) is using Condor in a variety of ways, including doing testing of embedded cameras (Micron PPT on the topic (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/CondorWeek2005/presentations/gore_micron.ppt)) Oracle () is using Condor as part of their build and regression testing system (Oracle PPT on the topic) (http://www.ppdg.net/mtgs/Troubleshooting/Oracle%20Grid.ppt)) A number of high energy physics groups are using Condor, especially in the work preparing for the new Large Hadron Collider on the French-Swiss border.