Sebastian Smith Posted December 4, 2014 Share Posted December 4, 2014 Howdy folks. Its been a while, I decided to rejoin the Hak5 game. Quick question; does anyone happen to have a ClusterKnoppix ISO still? Its so old I can not find a mirror. I have a bunch of old x86 servers taking up space and I decided they need to take up electricity too. Thanks in advance. Hope to see you at shmoocon! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cooper Posted December 4, 2014 Share Posted December 4, 2014 ftp://ftp.ntua.gr/pub/linux/clusterknoppix/clusterKNOPPIX_V3.6-2004-08-16-EN-cl1.iso Admittedly, it took some digging. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sebastian Smith Posted December 4, 2014 Author Share Posted December 4, 2014 Incredible. I have been looking all night. I wonder if it has anything to do with google giving me targeted results. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cooper Posted December 4, 2014 Share Posted December 4, 2014 The impossible while you wait, miracles may take a little longer. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sitwon Posted December 9, 2014 Share Posted December 9, 2014 ClusterKnoppix will almost certainly not do anything useful for you. Development of the upstream project was abandoned because there was no longer any pragmatic benefit to be had on the commodity hardware of the time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cooper Posted December 9, 2014 Share Posted December 9, 2014 (edited) ClusterKnoppix will almost certainly not do anything useful for you. Development of the upstream project was abandoned because there was no longer any pragmatic benefit to be had on the commodity hardware of the time. Your comment surprised me, so I went and searched for a more elaborate explanation for why ClusterKnoppix ceased. As it turned out way back in 2003, OpenMosix, which underpinned it, wasn't planning on advancing from Linux kernel 2.4 to 2.6 due to the invasiveness of their kernel work and the amount of effort it would take to port that to 2.6 which I can only assume to be the reason why ClusterKnoppix stopped being developed - nobody wanted to miss out on the rather impressive performance improvements provided by Linux 2.6 and they wouldn't be able to deliver it. I couldn't find an actual announcement to that effect though. OpenMosix itself was abandoned in 2007 (again, Linux 2.6.0 came out in 2003 and they still only had an unofficial patch) mainly because the original project lead came to the conclusion that his project wasn't doing what it set out to do. Their method of clustering was to move tasks to less busy nodes to properly load all nodes in the cluster. This works well when your task is a process. When your task is a thread, much less so, not in the least because multiple threads of a program tend to interact. Clustering a website would suck performance-wise. Clustering a database was next to impossible. Basically, their cluster would only allow you to cluster heavily parallel, relatively long-running and very independent tasks like clustered compiles, bitcoin mining or seti@home/distributed.net type loads. The people that were dealing with these problems were solving them either using MPI and/or just adding more resources to a single machine because the latency involved in moving a task off a system, along with the administration that follows, would tank the performance to the point of unusability (Moshe Bar himself admits the impact was a 100x to 1000x drop in performance). I wasn't into clusters as much then as I am now, so this little peek down memory lane delivered a lot of insight. Thanks for that! Edited December 9, 2014 by Cooper Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.