Things on the site itself that may be of interest to students or philosophers of any age or generation include complete online books of poetry, various support materials for the study of physics, and links related to beowulfery. All materials on this site that are authored by Robert G. Brown are Copyright 2004. The details of their Open Public License (modified) can be viewed here. If you use or enjoy anything at all on this site -- free textbooks, stories, programs, or other resources, consider hitting to help spread the word so others can find it as well. Note, Robert G. Brown is generally either rgb or rgbatduke on many external sites crosslinked here.
This page is devoted to beowulfery and cluster computing. There in an online book on cluster engineering, talks and tutorials, and software packages. You can either click directly to a resource page on the navigation bar above or browse the list below, where each link is accompanied by a short abstract.
I cherish feedback on any of these resources. To initiate a discussion, contact me.
This is a local copy of my online book on beowulf style cluster engineering. It is (and will likely always be) a work in progress, so check the revision number and dates from time to time to see if new material has been added.
This is the official website for the Wulfware suite of LAN or cluster monitoring tools. These tools all build from a single source rpm, or alternatively one can build them from the source tarball.
This project has a mailing list here. This is a (currently) very low traffic list devoted to bug reports, development announcements, feature requests and little else.
Submit bug reports, etc. to
rgb at phy dot duke dot eduThis is the current snapshot of the cpu_rate Microtimer harness and microbenchmark program. I use this program to do quick-and-dirty benchmarks of a variety of systems performance parameters. The timing harness itself is at least modestly advanced -- it uses the CPU cycle counter instead of gettimeofday where possible, for example (on all post-Pentium Intels, post-Athlon AMDs). There are tests for memory performance, "arithmetic" performance, transcendental (savage benchmark) performance. In many cases (specifically those involving vectors and memory) the size of the vectors can be varied and the effects of cache size and hierarchical memory explored.
This version of the code supports the relatively simple and "object-like" addition of code fragments to be timed. There is a fairly long list of operations and fragments it already times (enter "cpu_rate -l" to get a current list). It is in beta mode and may have bugs. There may well be better timers out there (e.g. lmbench) only perhaps. not so easy to use.
Because of the nature of this program I recommend that you grab the tarball and work with it rather than simply build/install either the source rpm or the provided (RH 9) binary rpm. The latter "should work", but part of the fun of a benchmark/timer is playing with build options and seeing how it works. There are also some (probably broken in the current release) scripts in the source directory that in previous versions scanned e.g. across the -s size option for the vector benchmarks; these scripts, with a bit of repair, would make it pretty easy to generate a graphable file of e.g. stream or memory read/write with and without random shuffling.
I hope that you find cpu_rate useful.
This is a white paper on how Duke might economically set up a "public" or "shared" cluster compute environment here without offending the Gods (the granting agencies that might participate) and in a maximally inexpensive and cost-beneficial manner.
Note Well: This is a Request for Comments only; please return comments and corrections to rgb for encorporation into what I hope to be a dynamic document associated with a project, rather than a static prescription that may, in fact, be heavily flawed.
This is a reasonably complete (some would say overcomplete:-) rendition of a standard introduction to beowulfery, developed from previous talks on the same subject I've given. As is frequently the case with talks, the pdf and ps images are likely to be "prettier" than the online version -- I haven't quite gotten a perfect latex2html-compatible talk style set up yet.
This is a 2006 update of my standard beowulf intro talk, with a Zen twist. It was last presented to the Science Club of Durham Technical Institute on 11/7/06, and is being posted so they (and you, if you are reading this) can access it to look over the content and linked resources.
Good luck! Feel free to contact me with e.g. bug reports or problems.
A presentation to the Duke HPC community on my ongoing research into the critical scaling of the helicity modulus, via Monte Carlo computations carried out on a cluster.
I can no longer remember where or when I found this while mousing around on the internet, but it is clearly something anyone seriously considering the choice between C and C++ should read before investing their future in one or the other.
Truly a classic, this work (and it's companion, next) were my original "online guides" in TCP/IP networking (and networking in general). You'd think they'd be dated, sixteen years later, but of course TCP/IP itself hasn't changed, ethernet hasn't fundamentally changed -- amazingly, these are still some of the best simple introductions available anywhere on or off the net. Thank you, Charles L. Hedrick, whereever you might be!
The companion work to the local area networking guide above, this work is just incredible. In addition to beautiful and tediously typed tty renditions of TCP, IP and ethernet packets showing most of the relevant details of their headers, this work reviews ports, RFC's, and more.