Why does our expert say that Linux is creeping in everywhere because it "unburdens what are normally the shackles on creativity?" Is Linux creeping into your research org? How does Linux let you repurpose older, otherwise antiquated hardware? Does Linux offer a cost-effective way to achieve general purpose parallel computing cycles with high performance and high reliability? What is Beowulf? Why Linux? Who is trying this? How is it working? Is it hard to do? Should you consider it? How would you get started?

Plan now to send in your questions to expert@cren.net and join our co-hosts on March 16 as they quiz Kevin Morooney about his work regarding "Research Computing and Linux Clusters." We think this is going to be a "hot" session, we're already receiving questions!

Kevin Morooney is Director, Graduate Education and Research Services, Center for Academic Computing, Pennsylvania State University where, among other things, he is involved with the work of the Numerically Intensive Computing Group on the Lion-X high speed Linux cluster.

Event Sponsor

CREN wishes to thank the sponsor of this event, Myricom, for helping to underwrite the costs of bringing this resource to you.

"Myricom is the designer and manufacturer of Myrinet: a high- performance, cost-effective packet communication and switching technology. The principal features of Myrinet are low latency, high data rate, low host processor utilization, high availability, and unlimited scalability. Myrinet is the interconnect solution of choice for scalable cluster computing and will be introducing its next generation "Myrinet2000" in June of 2000."

Co-Hosts

Howard Strauss, Manager of Academic Applications at Princeton University, is TechTalk's Technology Anchor.

Co-Host Judith Boettcher is CREN's Executive Director. Together, Howard and Judith will ask the really tough questions—and relay the questions you email to them at expert@cren.net.

Background & Resources

Got a resource to add to our list? Send suggestions to Event Page Producer Terry Calhoun at tcalhoun@scup.org. We're building this event's resource list right now and we'd welcome your contribution.

Here are some links to basic Linux resources:

• Linux has been in the higher education news recently. Here's a timely Chronicle article, Universities Turn to Linux for an Inexpensive Operating System, by Kelly McCollum.
• Red Hat
• Linux Online
• Linux.com

• An Introduction to Parallel Programming from the Maui High Performance Computing
• The Education, Outreach and Training Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure
• National Computational Science Alliance
• National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI)

• The Lion-X Cluster at Penn State is a high speed Linux cluster.
• Avalon is a 140 processor Alpha Beowulf cluster at the Los Alamos National Laboratory Center for Nonlinear Studies.
• Roadrunner is a linux cluster operated by the University of New Mexico for the NCSA PACI partnership.
• The Ohio Supercomputer Center has recently acquired a 128 processor Linux Cluster from SGI. This page points to using a smaller, older one but you get the point. The Berkeley Network of Workstations (NOW) project seeks to harness the power of clustered machines connected via high-speed switched networks.
• LoBoS is an implementation of a Beowulf class computer in the Computational Biophysics Section at the National Institutes of Health.
• This is the Beowulf Project at NASA CESDIS.
• Beowulf Consortium: In addition to a growing list of links to other Beowulf sites, the Beowulf Consortium provides a opportunity for sharing ideas among groups that are developing Beowulf software or developing application for Beowulf clusters.
• Real World Computing Partnership is a collection of Pentium or Alpha systems linked via giga-speed networks

About CREN

© CREN, 2000

Contact Us