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3 weeks ago | 
admin-magazine.com | Jeff Layton
When the world was dominated by dinosaurs, a new beast arose from the depths: one that relied on the earth's community to grow and thrive. It was Beowulf. No, not the Scandinavian warrior, but an approach to high-performance computing (HPC) that uses common x86 processors, conventional Ethernet networking, the Message Passing Interface (MPI) or a parallel virtual machine (PVM), and Linux. With Beowulf, everything was new.
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1 month ago | 
admin-magazine.com | Jeff Layton
I think virtually everyone in HPC knows the Warewulf open source cluster provisioning and management tool. I wrote about Warewulf starting with Warewulf 3, followed by a series on Warewulf 4. Since the beginning of the Warewulf 4 series, Greg Kurtzer, the original developer of Warewulf, formed the company CIQ to develop and support many products, such as Rocky Linux and Fuzzball, but I’m focusing on Warewulf. As of the writing of this article (May 2025), Warewulf version 4.6.1 is current.
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2 months ago | 
admin-magazine.com | Jeff Layton
The SC24 supercomputing conference really impressed upon me the level of excitement that people have around HPC when they are first introduced to it. The key moment for me was on the bus ride back to the hotel sitting next to a young person who was so impressed with what HPC had been doing to improve the world and where it was headed. They were very excited to get back to their employer and start jumping into HPC.
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Mar 9, 2025 | 
admin-magazine.com | Jeff Layton
Lately, I’ve been thinking more about what’s happening in the world of HPC. The items that have risen to the top are the following:During SC24 I had a few very enthusiastic people ask me how to get started in HPC or how I got started in HPC. Other people, such as Glen Lockwood had similar experiences.
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Nov 13, 2024 | 
admin-magazine.com | Jeff Layton
KISS. Occam’s razor. Betty Crocker’s Cookbook. A little black dress. A handshake. Four gigabytes of RAM. These examples exemplify the power of basics and simplicity. The idea of simplicity popped into my brain a couple of weeks ago when I was talking with several people about how manuals don’t include instructions for simple, obvious tasks because they either assume you can figure it out on your own or that the execution of the tasks is common knowledge.
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Oct 15, 2024 | 
admin-magazine.com | Jeff Layton
In the last article about creating a container for a development environment with HPC Container Maker (HPCCM), I didn’t talk about how to install editors or integrated development environments (IDEs). From my experience, I had a couple of thoughts about editors in the container, but I didn’t include them in the article, so in this article, I want to talk about some of the tools that can be used.
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Aug 23, 2024 | 
admin-magazine.com | Jeff Layton
Podman is the best non-root Docker tool I’ve found. Let me show you why. After writing about the HPC Containers Survey, I started thinking more about the survey results and how I use containers. From the survey, I noticed that people:use Docker on their local machines quite a bit relative to other technologies, even though the systems they use run Singularity;use the Docker recipe more than Singularity; anduse DockerHub as a central repository.
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Jul 8, 2024 | 
admin-magazine.com | Jeff Layton
In this article, I review the results of the HPC Container Community Survey, which comes from the Containers Working Group (CWG), whose charter describes the members and mission as: “container enthusiasts that want to discuss the needs of the HPC community and how they can be integrated into existing or new Open Container Initiative (OCI) projects, or perhaps CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation] projects.” The CWG is apparently part of the Open Containers Initiative (OCI) established...
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May 7, 2024 | 
admin-magazine.com | Jeff Layton
A small club of people, of which I'm the president and a member, are interested in personal clusters you can have in your office, and even on your desktop. I've made several home clusters from various components, ranging from the small Cluster HAT, to a small Raspberry Pi cluster, to an eight-node x86 stack. In my previous home I had three 20A circuits installed for clusters, I really like great performance but with low power usage, so I can get four nodes on a normal 15 or 20A circuit.
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Apr 9, 2024 | 
admin-magazine.com | Jeff Layton
While managing Linux desktops, laptops, and HPC systems, I learn new commands and tools. As a result, my admin patterns change. In this article I present some commands I have started using more often and have incorporated into my regular routine. teeSome scripts, whether for administrative functions or as part of a computational pipeline, write to output files.
