[announce] Special NYCBUG meeting Thursday, March 20th

[NYC*BUG Announcements]

March 20, 2008
Building a High-Performance Computing Cluster Using FreeBSD

6:30pm, Suspenders Restaurant
http://www.suspendersbar.com/location.php

Special NYC*BUG meeting with FreeBSD developer Brooks Davis

Please note that this meeting is not on our normal first Wednesday of the month, and that we will not be adjusting our other meetings

Since late 2000 we have developed and maintained a general purpose technical and scientific computing cluster running the FreeBSD operating system. In that time we have grown from a cluster of 8 dual Intel Pentium III systems to our current mix of 64 dual, quad-core Intel Xeon and 289 dual AMD Opteron systems.

In this talk we reflect on the system architecture as documented in our BSDCon 2003 paper "Building a High-performance Computing Cluster Using FreeBSD" and our changes since that time. After a brief overview of the current cluster we revisit the architectural decisions in that paper and reflect on their long term success. We then discuss lessons learned in the process. Finally, we conclude with thoughts on future cluster expansion and designs.

Bio

Brooks Davis is an Engineering Specialist in the High Performance Computing Section of the Computer Systems Research Department at The Aerospace Corporation. He has been a FreeBSD user since 1994, a FreeBSD committer since 2001, and a core team member since 2006. He earned a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science from Harvey Mudd College in 1998.

His computing interests include high performance computing, networking, security, mobility, and, of course, finding ways to use FreeBSD in all these areas. When not computing, he enjoys reading, cooking, brewing and pounding on red-hot iron in his garage blacksmith shop.

Brooks' BSDCon 2003 paper is available at http://people.freebsd.org/~brooks/papers/bsdcon2003/fbsdcluster/