Rocks Linux

Much more fun than a box of rocks!

Rocks is a Linux distribution based on CentOS. It's used to build high performance clusters. (HPC)

Latest release is 6.2 (sidewinder)

Key concepts,

• all nodes are configured automatically from the master (that's how I'd do it) no tweaking nodes by hand! (gag)
• they use RedHat kickstart
• Cluster wide configuration is stored in a Rocks MySQL database

See also

• Myrinet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myrinet - low overhead optical network, superceded when GBe became popular.
• MPI parallelism = message passing interface
• Maui cluster scheduler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maui_Cluster_Scheduler
• Ganglia - rrdtool based monitoring and graphing
• gm device
• PVFS

Links

Home page: http://www.rocksclusters.org/

Articles

USENIX

Philip Papadopolous Breaking the Myth of Homogeneous Clusters

Linux Journal, June 2009: http://www.linuxjournal.com/magazine/building-linux-based-high-performance-compute-cluster

Linux Magazine

Books

Building Linux Clusters (O'Reilly, 2000)

How To Build A Beowulf

Data Center Handbook

Design Technologies for Green and Sustainable Computing Systems

Getting Started With Julia Programming

OpenCL Parallel Programming Development Cookbook