It’s becoming clearer every day that the world is racing towards a state of constant, insatiable need for more and more computing power to make sense of the growing sea of data all around us – and we’ve barely scratched the surface. Just wait until IoT and machine learning kick into high gear. Not surprisingly, Linux clusters – in various evolving forms – continue to be the preferred approach for providing the computing horsepower to tackle these jobs, yet Linux clusters are notoriously complex and difficult to manage. For this reason, Bright Computing commissioned a market survey through Hyperion Research to understand how organizations are grappling with the challenges of Linux clusters in the face of growing demand.
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There are plenty of options for building a Linux cluster, including commercial and open-source software. Of course, there are limitations to the support an open-source community can provide, and not all commercial solutions are up to the task.
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In a previous blog we briefly discussed how sysadmins need to focus on the hardware side of the HPC cluster equation. Clustering, of course, is where businesses can approach the power of the “supercomputer,” and the nodes are the “brain cells” that need to be monitored and nurtured.
What clusters do best is run software applications in a parallel and resource-sharing way, where the sum of their power can be diminished by misallocated parts. Applications produce the data analytics and output that run the business, which can come to a sudden halt if issues like network monitoring and memory usage aren’t continually addressed.
Does your Hadoop cluster need a cluster manager? It just might. Let’s see why.
Every day we hear about more organizations implementing Hadoop as part of their IT infrastructure. Most people think of Hadoop installation as something that starts on top of an existing, working cluster. But how did that cluster get there? And once everything is up and running somebody has to keep the thing up and running in order to keeping getting value out of it.
Because the impact of unmanaged interactive sessions can be significant,[1] the concept of login nodes in Bright Cluster Manager was introduced in Part 1 of this series.[2] Although login nodes address many considerations relating to interactive use, they are designed to do so in a limited way. For example, in Part 1, the following consideration was outlined (emphasis added here):
Whether it’s force of habit, or from actual need, users of HPC environments crave interactivity. Because the impact of unmanaged interactive sessions can be significant, there exists the potential for concern. Is it possible to meet users’ need for interactivity while managing the potential for impact? In this first part of a two-part series on managing interactive impact, attention focuses on the introduction of login nodes to a cluster managed by Bright Cluster Manager. The second part in this series will focus on use of workload managers as a complementary means for managing the interactive impact on the compute nodes of a cluster.
Bright Cluster Manager includes an interactive shell known as CMSH. Owing to personal preference, or the task at hand, Bright admins might choose the Command-Line Interface (CLI) for cluster management rather than the Bright GUI.
The last time I participated in Bio-IT World it was May 2005. While Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee keynoted the event opening by sharing his vision for a next-generation Web, those of us in the trenches (aka. the exhibits area) attempted to communicate the value proposition for grid computing - or was it Grid computing, or even Grid Computing ...
