Project NITORI

[Wayfinder]

My laptop has joined.

On another note, it occurred to me that a nice little public image boost for gamers in general and us in particular might be possible if we build a nice photo opportunity relevant to the Grid. All we need to do is find a collection of old suitable console hardware that we can scavenge/acquire/have donated for free/very inexpensively (anything with an ethernet port which is capable of running Linux, e.g. XBOXes) and build a Beowulf cluster out of them.

Once their tiny little brains are formed into a vast, robust, easily scalable hivemind, we can harness it to the Grid!

The idea is nothing new, but if properly presented can be disseminated using the power of warm fuzzies (obsolete hardware being used for good, gamers doing socially aware things) and cool-factor (Beowulf clusters are awesome).

[lycurgus]

Beowulf clusters are awesome

having looked at the wikipedia article, i agree heartily. unfortunately the only hardware i have lying around at home is an old pc that doesn't even make it to BIOS anymore. of course it's probably a trivial problem, so i might bring it in some time and see what can be done with EGG members on hand to assist. failing that, it has a card or 2 (at very least a CPU) to donate to other machines.

[Geal'k]

I may have 7-8 old 486's and 3-5 old P1's that I could donate for a time......for at least as something as awesome as this anyway

[Snipes]

I'm all for this. I have very little in a way of hardware to contribute though because all the computers in my house that work are gainfully employed. Will be happy to lend a hand setting up something this epic, though.

[Pro Victim]

There are better cluster systems out there. The Beowolf cluster is just the best known. There is a live-on-disk build of linux mint that fits on a single floppy disk, and I have a box of floppies in my cupboard. (Enough with the inuendo) all in all, I think that this is a good idea. Do we want to hook up the entire fleet and rent out the hive mind as a [small] render farm?

[lycurgus]

We wouldn't be using the fleet - they're moved around and dismantled far too often to be useful for a cluster. We'd be using various network-capable gaming hardware, like xbox and ps3, for which there exist linux distros. Also acceptable are old pcs, provided we can make them look sufficiently awesome by the addition of superfluous rusty gears and valves.

[Geal'k]

and I have a box of floppies in my cupboard.

I don't see it

[Geal'k]

it being the inuendo

[Wayfinder]

We're looking for decent power-and-space to processor yield ratios. The point is to stitch together a very lightweight supercomputer from old (and less old) gaming hardware. Mainly using gaming hardware is important for kudos purposes and general awesome.

For the same reason, we're also not hiring the cluster out as anything - it will be used for humanitarian purposes via the World Community Grid.

While 486s are awesome, they also take up a lot of power and space in return for exactly fifty MHz of processing power. An XBOX by comparison has a slightly better processor (733MHz) and while it is HUEG for a gaming console takes up far less space/power than a 486 tower. A 486 is also not recognisibly a gaming console. (Yes Geal'k, I know that it may as well have been - I owned a 486 too.)

Seakas has already offered the use of an original XBOX and the club has an XBOX stuffed away somewhere in the back room. Two nodes so far!

We're now accepting offers of hardware donation! If you have network-capable consoles for which a Linux distribution has been written or PCs of P2 speed and above and you don't mind them being indefinitely absorbed into Project NITORI, speak up!

(Lyc and I were also throwing around ideas involving using NDSes in the cluster intermittently, because that would be awesome. Morgan, your experience running DS linux may be required.)

[lycurgus]

Project NITORI

project who what now?

[Beani]

Project NITORI

project who what now?

Nitori is the Science/Engineer character in Touhou.

[Wayfinder]

Project NITORI

project who what now?

NITORI will be the name of the system, and stands for... goddamnit I'm in the labs, away from the piece of paper I wrote it down on and unable to remember the whole thing. Also:

Nitori is also a Latin word defined as either "brilliance, brightness, glow; splendor" or "perseverance; reliability"

[lycurgus]

awesomesauce. i heartily support this proposition and/or public event.

let us know when you remember what it stands for

[Wayfinder]

I need not remember, for now that I am home I may read it from the hastily-scrawled post-it!

NITORI: Nonprofit Inquiry into Tedious and Occluded Research Interests.

Edit: With the few spare moments I had, I've just done a little reading into cluster computing and it seems that running BOINC on such a system might be severely non-trivial since a version doesn't appear to exist that elegantly uses a cluster environment. However, a MOSIX-like architecture looks promising since it appears to allow the cluster to be treated as a single system with multiple CPUs - all scheduling is handled under the hood.

Edit2: Seems BOINC uses shared memory to communicate with its integrated science applications (which actually do the work), making it distinctly non-cluster-friendly.

We can still do this, but it would mean putting a BOINC client on each machine (not hard at all, but slightly less cool).

Edit3: Distributed Shared Memory abstraction layers (e.g. migshm), now? There's a lot of conflicting information out there. Er, we might be able to do this the cool way and we might not.

I think that after exams we should set up a small 3-node proof-of-concept cluster and attempt to hack the hell out of it.

[lycurgus]

Dang computers and their confusingly incompatible architectures. How about we build the cluster and run a genetic algorithm, to write us an abstraction layer type thing on top of which to run the boinc client?

More seriously, is there alternative software we can use? either a non-standard cluster-friendly boinc client, or a client for a similar but more cluster-friendly project?

At any rate, putting things together and hacking the hell out of them sounds like a plan. What do we have in the way of initial hardware? We've got the 2 xboxes (the guild's and seakas'), but what shall we use as the 3rd node? Perhaps the half-dead old computer i have at home would do? (it may need to be revived first though).