Scyld Software's Becker on Linux, clustering, grid (LinuxWorld.au) [LWN.net]

China Martens talks with Donald Becker. "Becker is the founder and chief scientist of Linux clustering vendor Scyld Software, a subsidiary of Linux workstation and server vendor Penguin Computing. Privately held Penguin acquired Scyld in June 2003. Becker founded Scyld (pronounced "scaled" or "skilled') back in 1998, building on work he did while at NASA (the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration) where he started the Beowulf Parallel Workstation high performance clustering computing project. NASA was interested in his project for helping in the modeling of climate data. IDG News Service caught up with Becker as he took a quick break from demonstrating Scyld clustering software at [LinuxWorld]."

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Scyld Software's Becker on Linux, clustering, grid (LinuxWorld.au)

Posted Aug 16, 2005 20:51 UTC (Tue) by vblum (guest, #1151) [Link] (2 responses)

I am surprised Scyld is still around. They were the singular most expensive Linux distro with the worst support that I have ever had the pleasure to administer. A memory leak in their kernel forced us to reboot nodes in our production cluster every two weeks or so. No luck with support requests; we never got a single straight answer, let alone a fix, for the problem. The solution was to dump the >$1000 distro and run stock RedHat 8.

Scyld Software's Becker on Linux, clustering, grid (LinuxWorld.au)

Posted Aug 17, 2005 0:12 UTC (Wed) by jd (guest, #26381) [Link]

They seem to be around and seem to be releasing updates. What with, I'm not sure, as bproc on Sourceforge hasn't been updated in AGES and most serious MPI work is going into OpenMPI which hasn't been released yet. Nonetheless, Donald Becker is no fool and anything he says should be taken seriously.

Having said that, Beowulf needs an urgent revamp to stay in the clustering and grid computing game. It is no longer the only competitor - although MOSIX is fading, OpenMOSIX is still moderately active and supposedly has 2.6 support in CVS. It also has distributed shared memory.

There's also the Grid Resources for Industrial Applications project, Globus and a number of others. This isn't even counting "distributed computing" projects such as Cosm and BOING. I'm tracking some on Freshmeat, others I'm maintaining the Freshmeat record. The field is getting busy and Beowulf NEEDS to make some serious strides if it is to stay competitive.

Those interested in high-power grid computing might also want to look at kernel patches such as ABISS and GAMMA - these seem to offer much higher I/O performance, which is the big bottleneck with clusters.

Scyld Software's Becker on Linux, clustering, grid (LinuxWorld.au)

Posted Sep 13, 2005 18:56 UTC (Tue) by MrMichaelWill (guest, #32430) [Link]

A lot has happened since you last used it.

I work for Penguin Computing and they have aquired Scyld in 2003 and turned a three man show into a full blown company with tons of software developers and support staff.

We have lots of happy customers that know that it actually saves them money.

The nice thing is that we still have Donald Becker, the inventor of the Beowulf computing paradigm and massive open source contributor to Linux,
as our CTO.

Check out http://www.scyld.com and give it another chance.

If you want to try it out, I can give you access to an opteron demo cluster with infiniband and scyld ;-)

Michael Will

Scyld Software's Becker on Linux, clustering, grid (LinuxWorld.au)

Posted Aug 17, 2005 12:42 UTC (Wed) by achitnis (guest, #20) [Link]

Wee bit of nostalgia:

Back in the good old bad days when Linux was young :), circa 1993/94, I first tried out Linux (SLS), and couldn't get it to recognise an old Compex network card that I had retrieved from a recently deceased Novell Netware server. The card worked under SCO Unix (damn - the number of coincidental players in this tale!), but wouldn't play ball with Linux (0.99p11, I think, but my NVRAM fails me).

I had a look at the driver code, found Donald Becker's email address in there, and mailed him (from my Compuserve account, at a plucky 1200 bps over an X.25 network). He wrote back almost instantly (my first experience with this kind of thing), and sent me some test code to compile and run, which I did, and sent the results back to him. After a few iterations, he sent me some driver code - which worked. And my first ever Linux installation finally could talk to the network.

Sure, that is probably an experience many people have had, but how many of you lived in Bangalore, India, in 1993/94, when we barely had functional telephones, and public Internet access was still years away?

This experience was a major factor in my continued involvement with Linux over the years (to this day, in fact).

Fast forward to the year 2000. We (the FOSS community) were participating at an Expo, and one of our people had put together a 3-node Linux cluster. Lots of people crowded around, and he gave some background to what was being demonstrated. I had my back to him when I suddenly heard him say something like "...and that is how Donald Becker put together his first Beowulf cluster...".

Until then, Becker's name had been that of some unknown guy somewhere in the world who had helped me many years earlier....

OK, getting off the nostalgia wagon now.. :)