What I did during my Fall vacation . . .

I am actually surprised how much I seemed to need to have taken this week's vacation. I did not have anything scheduled or planned. I just did whatever it was I wanted to do and that was it. Put the boys on the bus every morning and got them off of the bus every night. Shame about Jacob's face. He fell at school and really scrapped things up the one side. It is not really bad. You can see it in a picture here.

So, what did I do this vacation?

We now move into the category of things I do as a hobby that a normal person will never be able to distinguish from what I do at work. I built a cluster using as many of the machines in the house as I could get working.

Several years ago, I managed the install of the largest machine I had ever worked on, an IBM Regatta p690. This server was the target platform for a suite of in-house applications that were migrating off the mainframe. It was huge. It weighed a ton. I felt special for working on it. Compared to the normal servers in the shop up to that point, this box was special.

As part of this project, the internal group for whom the server was being staged was talking about where they wanted to go in the future: utility computing. That was enough for me to start researching utility computing and the products that were used to build commercial-grade utility environments. First I was looking at Globus because it seemed reasonable that a group that decided to go with AIX would look at the grid system that IBM appeared to be behind. I also looked at Sun Gridengine and setup a small system using 3 Linux boxen and used them to do a couple of different data folding exercises using large datasets. Nothing really impressive, mostly just loading a couple million rows into a database, using multiple machines.

The problem I had with both of these systems was their apparent difficulty integrating Windows-based systems. As long as I kept to the Linux boxen in the house, then I was fine. But there were always going to be a mix of Linux and Windows any (hopefully) other machines in the house. And Gridengine cost money to run on Windows. Globus was just overkill.

My interest in utility computing was not just being driven by the potential of having to support it for a paycheck. I was also interested in getting some more use out of the various machines at home. Like most technical people, I have a collection of machines sitting at home. Right now, there are about six machines that are capable of running either Linux or Windows and one Sparc running Solaris. But most of the time these machines are just sitting there doing nothing. Natalie's laptop is on, but only being used when Natalie is home. The boys' machine is not normally on, but could be easily utilized during school or overnight. And the rest of the machines are here, waiting for me to use them for this or that thing.

Since that time, I have also started doing some 3D rendering (because everyone needs a hobby). And some of these renders take a lot of time. The longest render I have done so far took about 12 hours. That was 12-hours where I really could not use the main machine I use for anything because the render was sucking all the CPU cycles.

Then I remembered there was another utility/grid system that I had looked at but never got working, Condor. I had been thinking about the Condor model a lot more recently. This week, I tried to install it again at home.

Right now I have five different systems available to run jobs for me. I have already rerendered most of the POV files that I have created over the last couple months using Condor. I am looking into how to do the same with Blender and any other software I can install on more than one machine here in the house. There were jobs where I wanted to see how a model would look rotated, but did not want to take the 10 to 20 frames I normally do rotation using when a single frame takes from 45 minutes to 2 hours to complete. With Condor, I have rendered about 5 frames at once on different machines. This has dramatically reduced the amount of time I am waiting for renders to finish. And I have learned a little bit more about how to use the resources available to me.

Now I just have to start thinking of things to do using the technology.

Yes, I have reached another “Now What” moment.