Sun Grid

Message boards : Number crunching : Sun Grid
Message board moderation

To post messages, you must log in.

AuthorMessage
Profile Jared0x90

Send message
Joined: 10 Apr 06
Posts: 1
Credit: 35,758
RAC: 0
United States
Message 282786 - Posted: 16 Apr 2006, 3:53:49 UTC

Hey,

I used the original SETI client many years ago and I guess after some HD failure never got around to getting back to it. Recently I got motivated to start using BOINC.

I was curious if anyone had thought about adapting a Solaris version of BOINC to be run on the Sun Grid? I have not looked into this much but I was curious if anyone else had thought about this.

http://www.jx90.com/
ID: 282786 · Report as offensive
Profile Lee Carre
Volunteer tester

Send message
Joined: 21 Apr 00
Posts: 1459
Credit: 58,485
RAC: 0
Channel Islands
Message 282801 - Posted: 16 Apr 2006, 4:53:56 UTC
Last modified: 16 Apr 2006, 4:54:29 UTC

hi, welcome to BOINC-SETI :)

the only problem is who would pay to run boinc on the sun grid at $1/CPU/hour?

the idea of BOINC is that regular computers are used by projects who have very limited budgets, and can't afford to buy time on supercomputers (because it's so expensive)

i think the sun grid was designed for say a company, or organisation who had the money, or wanted "secure/reliable" results
however due to the much lower costs, more and more places are looking seriously at BOINC to perform their work (various departments at CERN come to mind)

the sungrid probably uses it's own distribution method, and all they require from the "client" (eg a company) is their dataset, and instructions on how to instruct the clients' app to process the data into results
Want to search the BOINC Wiki, BOINCstats, or various BOINC forums from within firefox? Try the BOINC related Firefox Search Engines
ID: 282801 · Report as offensive
Profile SunMicrosystemsLLG

Send message
Joined: 4 Jul 05
Posts: 102
Credit: 1,360,617
RAC: 0
United Kingdom
Message 283087 - Posted: 16 Apr 2006, 18:04:46 UTC

Hi,

We were part of the engineering team that was involved in some of the early work on the SunGrid and from time to time we used to put the grids (2x 256 CPU Opteron clusters) onto SETI while it wasn't being used.

There is little or no modification required to get BOINC/SETI to run on the SunGrid, you just need a scheduler, such as N1 Grid Engine, to distribute the jobs across the nodes.
Each node runs it's own instance of the app - much the same way as S@H member's SETI farms run the app.
Splitting an individual work unit and sharing at across the grid would have been a big task, so it makes sense to just run the app the way BOINC intended.

SunGrid doesn't force the customer to use it's own distribution method.
There are 2 flavours of SunGrid - the Utility Grid (www.network.com) and the Commercial Grid. The commerical grid offers more flexability, where after some initial configuration work by Sun and the customer a re-buildable environment is created which the customer can return to time and time again on a contract basis to run their apps. This environment can be Solaris or Linux, MPI enabled, N1 Grid Engine enable, etc, etc.
Sun will work with the customer to create the grid framework they need.


But to go back to your first point, using SunGrid for S@H (if you have to pay for it ...) is probably had to justify.
We earned the majority of our credit over a period of 2-3 months last year, we worked out that if we had to pay for the time we used it would have been around $100,000. The pricing model and infrastructure is designed to offer a competitive alternative for a company investing in and running a datacentre - not a publically accessible and ultimately free infrastructure such as BOINC.

(formerly SunGrid_LLG_ORT)
ID: 283087 · Report as offensive

Message boards : Number crunching : Sun Grid


 
©2024 University of California
 
SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.