sketches by dominique cimafranca

sketches by dominique cimafranca:

One of the editions of the Inquirer last week carried the story of the Philippines' latest entrant into parallel processing supercomputers. Lorma Colleges, a private school in San Fernando City in the Ilocos region, was featured for its 17-node Beowulf cluster. While certainly not the first in the country, it is notable for being the first outside of Metro Manila.

What exactly is a Beowulf cluster? It is a type of massively parallel computer built primarily out of commodity hardware components. The cluster consists of PCs interconnected by a private high-speed network. Its main purpose is for high-performance computing in process-intensive environments like mathematics, physics, chemistry, and simulations.

Beowulf works by dividing a large processing task into several smaller ones and farming them out to the nodes on the cluster. The programs have to be specially written to take advantage of the parallel processing capabilities. Special libraries like PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) and MPI (Message Passing Interface) allow developers to write these message-passing parallel programs, typically in Fortran or in C.

Let's take the more practical example of graphics rendering, such as what is done for a movie like "Lord of the Rings." High resolution scenes are typically built from wireframe models, skins, and light sources, each one a mathematical model in a database. A single scene can take hours, maybe days, to assemble on a single machine, and that's only for a single scene! High-performance computing clusters come into the picture because they can divide the work into different nodes, each one rendering a different frame, or even rendering a scene simultaneously. On Linux, this possible using Beowulf clusters and programs like POVRAY.

Incidentally, the special effects "Lord of the Rings" were actually done using Linux.

Beowulf parallel processing clusters are only one kind of cluster possible under Linux. There are also high-availability clusters and failover clusters. We will cover these clusters in future articles.

But back to the local scene: so far, there's been no lack of Beowulf clusters in the country, as groups have been assembling them at one time or another. (The biggest one, to my recollection, was a 30-node cluster of IBM servers that iPhil assembled for a Linux show in Manila.) What does seem to be lacking is visibility of the applications that are being run on the clusters; let's see if we can't correct that soon.