Ask Slashdot: "Be" is for Beowulf? 179
PhiberOptik asks: "Considering that
BeOS is so adept at
handling high I/O and network bandwidth, whould it make a
good OS for a Beowulf cluster? I know that since BeOS is
not open-source it would be harder to have applications
made, but they would be easier to maintain; as BeOS has a
standard set. Any ideas?" Could this be done? What OS
characteristics are necessary for a Beowulf cluster?
not really (Score:1)
-- Anton
(hey ytinasni)
1st post?
Re:What? (Score:1)
There are a number of proprietary implementations of Unix that comply with the POSIX standard.
Take note that Linux is not POSIX certified.
Moderation (was Re: First Post) (Score:1)
At any rate, I'm of the opinion that the poster has every right to be dissapointed with the current moderation format. The moderators have been chosen to help self-police a community which prides itself on individualism, intelligence and creativity. Yet as far as I can tell, all the moderators have managed to do is kiss up to celebrities, harass ACs, and mangle situations like this.
Re:Moderation (was Re: First Post) (Score:1)
Re:Yes (Score:1)
BeOS for clusters. Short: no. Long: read on.. (Score:2)
Other than that, forget it, your dual-400MHz P2 is more CPU than you'll ever need, running BeOS. Hell, with personalStudio 1.0 from Adamation, you can do real-time video effects with _ONE_ 300MHz cpu.
I have a 400MHz P2 and I've never been able to use all the processor, other than mp3 encoding direct from cd.
--M
Re:open source?? (Score:1)
Re:That is not offtopic! (Score:1)
Re:BeOS Performance??? (Score:1)
Debugging threads is a nightmare, anyway.
Re:open source?? (Score:1)
Why on earth would you want to do DSM in software anyway? It might be an interesting experiment, but:
Re:Expenses (Score:1)
Heck, I stoop to pick up 5 cents. I once spent several minutes breaking a $10 roll or quarters out of the ice once (it was actually $9.75, one coin was missing).
If that $2500 is american (which I suspect), that would get me another three dual celery boxen. I just got one (similar to the sub 1k dual celeron on TCU [tcu-inc.com], minus a few bits I already had) last week for $1655NZD (about $800USD due to tax). As you say, that $2500 is not in the slightest bit trivial.
Pentium is overkill (Score:1)
Re:Expenses (Score:1)
Re:I agree (Score:1)
Closed source s/w has to be well documented or you will almost never be able to get anywhere with it; you can't look at the source to see how to use a function. Open source s/w can get away without docs because they are, for the most part, redundant (though even a synopsys of what's where, or a diagram or two, would be a big help).
Tulip works great... (Score:1)
Is BeOS a Linux compatitor? (Score:1)
I may have gotten this wrong, but last year
(october orso) I had some conversations with some BeOS represtatives at a fair and from what
they demonstrate and what they where telling me,
I got the impression that BeOS has is dedicated purpose for being a creative multimedia platform
(OS) just like Novell has it's purpose of being a Networking plantform (OS).
I thought BeOS was no match for Linux( being a multi-purpose OS), did I get it wrong?
Could it be the .sig? (Score:1)
Call me crazy, but maybe trying to make Rob Malda look stupid is the wrong thing to be doing with your
Equally bad would be 'Alan Cox - you are what you eat' and 'Linus fscks penguins.'
If you want to be taken seriously, get a new
Mine's not that great, but it's not flamebait.
Don Negro
You have been using Windows a lot, have you? (Score:1)
Besides, you can shut down BeOS GUI and use telnet/bash only...
J.
s/GUY/GUI :) and why is my comment down here? (Score:1)
Oh well...
J.
Re:Rogue moderators? (Score:1)
_damnit_
Re:Rogue moderators? (Score:1)
Incidently, from the Beowulf Programming overview: "The Beowulf distribution includes several programming environments (all developed elsewhere) and development libraries as individually installable
packages. PVM, MPI, and BSP are all available. SYS-V--style IPC and p-threads are also supported."
_damnit_
Re:That's not what most BeOS developers say (Score:1)
NASA went with a free OS in the first place was
that it's typically necessary to make
modificiations in the OS in order to get decent
performance. Computational clustering like Beowulf
stresses systems in a fairly unique way, and most
general purpose OS's don't rise to the challenge.
BeOS may be a great OS, but I suspect even Gasse
himself wouldn't be surprised if it didn't meet
Beowulf needs perfectly, and consequently required
some mods.
PVM and MPI (Re: First Post!) (Score:3)
And of the two, MPI is generally vastly superior to p-threads because (IIRC) MPI is a higher level implementation which provides communication routines that are optimized for each particular hardware implementation (depending on the version/implementation of MPI). For example,
the actual implementation of MPI_Reduce() will vary depending on whether the nodes are in a shared/non-shared memory environment -- in a non-shared environment (eg. a Beowulf cluster), MPI uses a tree-method in order to distribute the data among the nodes in parallel.
Anyways, the point is that MPI is really just a communications specification (Message Passing Interface) with language bindings (C and Fortran). What you really want is a set of client/server daemons that _implement_ MPI.
Okay, I'm done with the conch now.
Re:BeOS question (Score:1)
BeOS Performance??? (Score:1)
Does anyone have any numbers on BeOS performance. As those of us old enough to vote know, every commercial OS vendor signs their own praises:
This means that the new release is either faster than an old one, or that it seems faster due to increasing CPU speeds.
Utterly meaningless in most cases. Maybe they include some primitive, closed web-server?
Could mean many things.
They've coded in hardware acceleration for at least two chipsets, support 32-bit color and they have some new widget type hacked into one of their "control-panels".
After conducting numerous comparitive tests, they found one test which, under certain (silly) circumstances, does indeed outdo the competition.
Production is the only true benchmark.
Re:Moderation (was Re: First Post) (Score:1)
Come on -- who's a moderator around here and who's not changes almost daily, as far as I can tell. I've got doubts there are many people out there moderating for the sake of making their "clan" (which they might not even belong to tomorrow) look good.
Not a moderator today, but have been a few times,
T.
Re:What? (Score:1)
Certified means that a standards organization has OFFICIALLY DECLARED that it runs POSIX programs. This is usually expensive. Good testing isn't cheap, and standards organizations are often profit based. Apparently this hasn't been done for Linux yet.
I don't know which organization handles the POSIX trademark. (service mark? copyright?)
it exists in a way... (Score:1)
--
http://www.beroute.tzo.com
Re:not really (Score:1)
Remember, Be gives the OS away for free to anyone who'll pre-install it.
Re:First post! (Score:1)
Maya for BeOS (Score:1)
However, Maya's code base was designed to be portable across OSs and CPUs [thus Maya/NT], and in fact may still have a little bit of MacOS support in it. Now, since I left they may have added all sorts of non-portable cruft, but I doubt it.
Just throwing in my 2 cents..
Reid
NT clustering (Score:2)
Christopher A. Bohn
Yes/No (Score:3)
That said, there's no reason you couldn't set up a "Cluster of Workstations" (COW) which is basically what you're thinking of -- it's been done with Solaris, NT,
Christopher A. Bohn
Re:not really (Score:2)
seanf();
First post! (Score:1)
Re:First post! (Score:1)
Re:First post! (Score:2)
Re:Moderation (was Re: First Post) (Score:2)
It is not unusual to see random comments and junk marked "interesting" or "informative" regardless of the validity of the content. This is unacceptable behaviour the Slashdot moderators.
open source?? (Score:2)
Re:Moderation (was Re: First Post) (Score:1)
As a matter of fact, you have absolutely no basis for what you just said. Informative, insightful, and relevant comments get moderated up regardless of the subject matter. If a comment isn't pro linux, but has GOOD REASONING as to why linux isn't good, it's labelled informative. Get your facts straight before you start slinging accusations.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
Be's networking isn't all that (Score:3)
I also don't see why you need to have a "single set" of software for an OS for use with Beowulf. I'd think you could handle installing the same software in your given cluster, and I don't know of software for Beowulf that people are wanting to distribute in a binary-only fashion. Do such beasts exist?
Don't get me wrong, I'm a Be fan, and I run it on my home box for weeks (sometimes while doing Linux technical support ;), but I don't see how it would be even as good as Linux for Beowulf purposes.
Re:What? (Score:1)
what does it take to become "certified", as you put it?
------------------------------------------
Reveal your Source, Unleash the Power. (tm)
Re:What? (Score:1)
Re:First post! (Score:1)
Probably because of "first post" in the subject line.
Re. moderators being stupid, remember that hundreds of moderators will read your message. Any incidental stupidity will average out - so your final score probably _will_ reflect what the average active slashdotter thinks it should be. If you disagree with this, well and good, but that reflects a difference of opinion as opposed to "stupidity" on the moderators' part.
Moot point for the moment, though, as this has only been up an hour or two.
I don't see why not. (Score:2)
In practice, you can set up clusters on just about any system that supports both multithreading and networking. YMMV.
Expenses (Score:2)
Um, the boxes that you are clustering will probably cost enough to make $50-$60 utterly insignificant, even if you use cheap celeries. My cost estimate for building a cluster of my own was about $400 US per node for just hardware (still haven't done it yet, in case you were wondering).
Distributed memory (Score:2)
True. However, depending on the application, workarounds could suffice. A scheme that I speculated about would have a "lock memory region" command that you would call before accessing a data structure, that paged it in from the remote box that it was stored on if necessary, and also handled coherence. You would unlock it when you were finished with it. This would have substantial overhead, but for many classes of problem it would be adequate.
Similarly, for many classes of problem just a set of distributed clients with their own memory spaces would work. It all depends on what you are trying to do.
Re:BeOS question (Score:2)
I've heard other people report problems with this chipset too. Send in a bug report to Be (check their web page). They'll either revise it themselves (if it was an internally written driver) or get the contractor to revise it if it was something that they paid for.
Re. the NE2000 compatible card, in principle that should work with the "NE2000" setting. In practice, who knows.
From a purely diagnostics point of view, I'd suggest trying each of the cards individually, to see if having the two cards in at once is causing problems (the uninitialized card may be causing bus or IRQ contention).
Re:Software must be Open Source (Score:2)
That assumes that you want to run the OS itself as a shared process. If all you want is a distributed application, this isn't necessary (though kernel support of shared memory helps, as another poster pointed out).
Moderation (Score:2)
I was here before the present moderation system was in place. It wasn't pretty. While some posts are unjustly moderated down (or up), the vast majority of moderation that I've seen has been deserved.
In this case - I agree that it was an informative post. However, the moderator that marked it down didn't agree. If other moderators think that it was informative, it will be marked up again.
Last but not least, the moderators are the _readers_. Read the moderator guideline documents, and the articles on the subject. If you browse slashdot regularly, and post, you _will_ get moderator access now and then. The whole "all moderators are corrupt" view looks a bit strained in this light.
You asked (Score:1)
A GUI usually consists of many processes and each process may contain any number of threads. Besides the memory that these GUI processes/threads uses (most of which will get swapped to disk as they not used for long periods of time), they also have an entry in the process table. Ideally you would hope that the OS would only have to check the process table entries for these GUI processes/threads to see that they are sleeping during a context switch. However, because GUI's are message based they often contain timers/signals/etc that demand small amounts of CPU time (ie a screen saver timer). To make it worse, a timer/signal-handler may be in a process that has been swapped to disk thus causing a page-fault (which causes an interrupt, swapping of disk to memory, decrement of PC, etc). So really, even if a GUI seems like it is idle, it isn't and it is using valuable resources.
Re:Is BeOS a Linux compatitor? (Score:1)
just my opinion though.
Re:You asked (Score:1)
That is not offtopic! (Score:1)
-lx
Re:BeOS question (Score:1)
-lx
Seems pretty implausible to me. (Score:2)
There are some special purpose applications where an OS can make a real difference. Traditional operating systems, for example, have trouble keeping up when there are a lot of tiny chunks of data that need to be processed by user-level server processes (one of the reasons why routing, logging, and nfsd are in the kernel). There are some operating systems specifically designed for such applications, but they have to make other trade-offs. And I don't see this being an issue with Beowulf applications.
Marketeers like to make claims about one system being a lot faster than another (c.f. Windows NT vs. Linux), but in practice, I find those are pretty meaningless.
For Beowulf in particular, given that it's being developed with Linux and given that the people on the project know very well how to hack the Linux kernel and networking code, even if there were a bottleneck in some release of Linux, it's a good bet that it would get fixed really quickly. How much effort do you think Be Inc. is going to invest in addressing performance problems for distributed scientific computing, given that their target market is desktop multimedia?
Uhm so is.. (Score:1)
Could it be hardware? (Score:1)
Without knowing the details of your system, I'd suggest that you remove any cards that aren't supported under the BeOS to see if that fixes your stability problem. It isn't an ideal solution, especially if you're dual-booting, but if you don't have the need to boot into another OS for a while you might want to give it a shot.
Remote login (Score:1)
"Eight CPUs per person are not enough!" (Score:2)
Programs have to be written specificaly for SockHop and use its base class instead of BLooper (Be's basic thread + event loop class) SockHop also uses a set of classes to handle routing of BMessages between threads.
Re:BeOS Performance??? (Score:1)
the most part, you're automatically writing a
multi-threaded app whenever you subclass from
BApplication...
cool.
-WW
--
Why are there so many Unix-using Star Trek fans?
When was the last time Picard said, "Computer, bring
Strictly Speaking (Score:1)
It wouldn't be a Beowulf Cluster, because they run on Linux. Doesn't BeOS have a native GUI, this would be an overhead. Linux has the advantage in that you can disable everything except what you need to optimize available CPU time. I think that Beowulf-type clusters will remain on the Linux kernels, possibly xxxBSD.
Re:Maya for BeOS (Score:1)
Shinobi - Inquisitor of CoJ, Champion of Lady weeanna
"Why despair? We are all going to die anyway!"
Re:BeOS for clusters. Short: no. Long: read on.. (Score:2)
fields. In mid-level work (A few thousand frames in 768*576) its quite easy to make 10 P2 Xeons to choke, and thats an optimized scene. Trust me, Im talking of my own experiences. With good programs for BeOS, and clustering-ability, BeOS could be a good contender, certainly better than Linux and *BSD because of their severe deficiencies in the graphics and computing-areas compared with BeOS. And I dont find BeOS proprietarity to be a problem. In fact, it seems to help rather than hinder in their case.
Shinobi - Inquisitor Cult of Jolt, Champion of Lady weeanna "Why despair? We are all going to die anyway!"
Re:open source?? (Score:1)
What does the fact that an operating system not being open source have to do with the ability to write applications for it?
Because with something like this, you are likely to want to make modifications to the operating system. For the most obvious example, Be's proprietary status will make it difficult to strip out that pretty GUI, which you don't particularly want to be running on every node in your cluster.
I was under the impression that these days network shared memory is generally considered a bad idea for performance reasons (by abstracting away the distinction between local and nonlocal data you abstract away much of your ability to optimise for performance), but there are a number of other kernel modifications the beowulf [beowulf.org] people have made.
Cluelessness, or FUD? (Score:1)
The fact that a system has a GUI does not make the use of this GUI a precondition for any application.
Re:Moderation (was Re: First Post) (Score:1)
I don't think that much of the bias is based on topic though. I have yet to see a really informative post moderated down, I've seen them not get that 2 but I haven't seen any animosity towards some subjects. There is a difference.
If a post is pro-Linux or pro-GNU or pro-Be or pro-BSD, I generally don't see them being informative or cream of the crop type posts. The truly informative ones don't have a bias towards a product. there will naturally be bias posts that are full of information though and since there are far more linux heads here they will more be promoted more often, I don't think that is always bias towards the products though. Of course I don't read all the posts so I don't know, if you could post some links to articles which were moderated down it could be useful, send them to Rob and maybe he can weed out the bad moderators.
Re:Uhm so is.. (Score:1)
Re:Uhm so is.. (Score:1)
Also Had it crash while using my wintv card.
My hardware is pretty plain.
PII 400mhz
64MB RAM
56k Modem
Riva/TnT agp card
Hauppauge WinTV card (404)
NetGear FA310TX ethernet card
Re:Uhm so is.. (Score:1)
I run Linux all the time and have netscape crash at least once a day but it doesn't take down my whole system.
And yes i can understand the plugin causing the problem when it crashes the system.
rimez
Rogue moderators? (Score:1)
---
Put Hemos through English 101!
What? (Score:2)
A standard set of what? If you are talking about system calls, I wouldn't call Linux "non-standard". In any case, "proprietary" is the opposite of "standard".
---
Put Hemos through English 101!
Out of the box support for telnet (Score:1)
As a Beowulf OS it is most likely not the direction that Be would want to go. Other than render farming there are not many multimedia applications that would benifit from clustering. That is the main design goal of Be, to be the media OS.
Re:Expenses (Score:1)
Re:First post! (Score:1)
This moderation does suck, in a big way, but hey, it's not my site, it's andover.net's. Back In The Day, pre-moderation, the jerks would often try to drown out the conversation, but now they have moderation powers. It helps their cause a lot. I have my threshold set at zero, and I find myself reading negative-index posts more and more....
Re:Rogue moderators? (Score:1)
What part of "moderator" don't you understand? (Score:1)
Everything you read anywhere is pushed through some subjective filtering. We read slashdot because we share tastes with the moderators and appreciate their choice of articles.
Re:Expenses (Score:1)
This is false. $2500 spends exactly the same as 12.5% of $20K, 50% of $5K, or 200% of $1250. $2500 is $2500.
If I saw $2500 lying on the street, I believe I might exert myself to pick it up.
--
Re:Moderation (was Re: First Post) (Score:1)
I'm surprised to see that people have such a problem with the moderation since the posts are moderated by readers like themselves. If you post enough, and read enough you will get a chance.
Re:Moderation (Score:1)
I think the moderation would be better if if was more widespread, though
There are quite a few things that get knocked down which perhaps ought not be, but when you are the moderator it's tough to dole out points to correct things like this. Maybe the averaging effect would work better if there were more people with moderation power at any given time, or if moderators had more points. Or (dare I suggest such a complicated thing?) there were specific points allocated for correcting over- or under-moderated posts? Actually, that wouldn't really add anything special other than semantically, since you could already spend your points up or down.
Just a thought -
timothy
Yes (Score:1)
Multimedia is a niche they chose because they feel that to have a good story, they need focus. The same logic would call Linux a server platform.
Re:Cluelessness, or FUD? (Score:1)
Re:What? (Score:1)
Proprietry is indeed the _exact_ opposite of standard.
There are a number of proprietary implementations of Unix that comply with the POSIX standard.
Possible, if you mean proprietary in an area that doesn't conflict with POSIX.
But I beleive that you are confusing proprietary with non-open-source. Which are completely unrelated.
While it might be difficult to keep something proprietary in an open source project, any closed source project can certainly have either proprietary or standard interfaces.
Re:If you like Clusters and liked Beowulf... (Score:1)
Widgets Of Webdom.
Go ahead......port MPI (Score:1)
The majority of the problems we like to solve are not the "embarrisingly parallel" problems like rendering frames of animation or bits of a single scene in a 3D picture. CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) applications (along with most other engineering apps) is matrix algebra intensive. Imagine matrices too large to fit into the RAM of a single processor (1e6 x 1e6 of 32-bit fp valuese, say). We divide this matrix up into sub-matrices and put the parts on the various nodes of the cluster. When we want to do matrix-vector multiplication there has to be a fair amount of communication for that to happen.
The point is that we require two things, high memory bandwidth (good cache helps here, but not enough), and low network latency. With fast ethernet the costs (in time) of sending one byte of data between two machines is nearly the same as 1k byte.
We don't particularly care about the OS as long as it stays out of the way. If the networking latency under BeOS is bad, then it's a bad OS for the cluster. If Be is constantly doing stuff in the backgroud, then it's a bad operating system for clusters.
There's nothing stopping anyone from porting MPI and giving it a try though.........
Re:Go ahead......port MPI (Score:1)
obiviously we don't have to store the whole thing, but that's not really the point.
matrix-vector products, also called matvec's (important in iterative solves of systems of linear algebraic equations) can be done faster in parallel than serially and are RAM bandwidth bound (not just amount). Then, after you do the part local to the processor, communications latency and bandwidth provide the bounds on performance.
Re:That's not what most BeOS developers say (Score:1)
I agree (Score:1)
Re:BeOS Performance??? (Score:1)
BeOS: 15 seconds (I had a 300kb compressed jpeg background res:1024x768 and 32-bit color)
Win98: 1 minute 10 seconds (I had a 2mb bmp res:1024x768 and 32-bit color)
That's not what most BeOS developers say (Score:3)
What makes you think that open-source software is any easier to develop? Be has documented the entire BeOS API and provides tons of sample code on every CD they sell. If you subscribe to the Be developer newsletter then they usually send more sample code plus tutorials in every issue. Don't get me wrong, I am not anti-linux. I do question the logic behind GPL'ing apps all the time. As a person trying to learn C++, I want to be able to make money off of the app itself... not supporting it. OSS has its place, and it is definitely got an impressive list of apps. However we need moderation because an all OSS world is no different than an all closed source world.
Re:Expenses (Score:1)
At that point, +/- $2500 is a lot less significant. If, however, you are patching a cluster together out of old machines, then $2500 is a pretty big deal.
It all depends on your frame of reference.
-awc
Linux barely supports multiple NICs... (Score:1)
Of course, the new threaded TCP/IP stack is now in the development version, so Linux should soon excell at benchmarks, and it might help cluster apps too.
Re:BeOS Performance??? (Score:1)
Yes its harder, but not too much so once you get used to it. I find signals much harder to debug, but then I don't have that much experience with them. And besides, the power of threading, especially in BeOS, is well worth it.
Re:BeOS Performance??? (Score:1)
Re:Uhm so is.. (Score:1)
OT - Maybe a hardware conflict Linux ignores (Score:1)
My first suspicion would be that the cards aren't supported -- though the hardware support list includes them, so a) maybe they're not what you think they are (i.e. are you certain of them), or b) there's a hardware conflict on your PCI bus (or somewhere else) that Linux works around but is blocking Be? I don't know enough technical info on hardware to know why this might happen, but I've heard it can.
Good luck!
Re:Expenses (Score:1)
Re:Uhm so is.. (Score:1)
Re:BeOS Performance??? (Score:1)
4th. Look at the specs for BFS. Watch how quickly it can search the file sytem. Need I go on?
Re:BeOS Performance??? (Score:1)