[announce] NYCBUG Tonight: Brooks Davis

[NYC*BUG Announcements]

March 20, 2008
Brooks Davis: 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" available at 
http://people.freebsd.org/~brooks/papers/bsdcon2003/fbsdcluster/ 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.