Hi Chris,
I actually found your old slides regarding the different tiled display tech
and AG. I have worked closely with Joe, Phil, Mason, Anoop and Greg, but
with Mason leaving UC and into the "real world", the Viz roll has pretty
much died out. I have also had some fun and candid moments with Larry.
I know the lead dev for Warewulf from my days at LBNL/NERSC, which is how I
stumbled onto Perceus and Warewulf. I like it much better as I fell it has
much greater flexibility (and supported Ubuntu) over ROCKS. ROCKS might be
a bit easier to build a cluster with from the ground up, but I find
maintaining a cluster with Perceus and Warewulf much nicer. You use images,
almost like playing with VMs. I can create node images for CGLX, SAGE,
whatever, and deploy them via command line and reboot. I can even split my
wall into half CGLX and half SAGE. Calit2 (now called Qualcomm Institute
BTW) has some other display tech they use, and they are very interested in
how I am running my wall - I need to sit down with Joe and Falko Kuester to
discuss migrating some systems from ROCKS to Perceus or Warewulf.
My current wall is made up of SuperMicro based 2U 2 node twins for the
tiles - they currently have 24G of RAM, but we can easily (and cheaply)
move to 48G if needed, a single 3.2GHz X5672 Xeon, no hard drives, and an
nVidia GTX 670 wth 2G VRAM. They also have on board QDR IB should we need
the bandwidth. The OS runs in RAM and the OS image is around 700 MB.
The head is a similar system, but a single 2U with 24GB RAM, 3.6GHz and
mirrored SSDs for the OS. We also have an ASUS Xonar DGX PCIe card (the
reason for using the 3.5 kernel). We have a 3U ZFS based storage system,
half populated, with about 10T RAIDZ2. Both are without IB for now, but can
be added later as needed. So, for now, we have GigE, but it seems to handle
4K video fairly well. I can also get 10G to the heads if needed.
Anyway, we'll do some small scale testing first, see what we can get going.
And, then we'll see about getting some more dedicated AG hardware for
video/audio capture and management. I'll do my best to keep you updated.
Ian
On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 3:56 PM, Christoph Willing <***@uq.edu.au>wrote:
> Ian,
>
> Thats an interesting project you have in mind. We have an OptIPortal here
> at UQ and we used to run it with Rocks and CGLX a few years ago - now using
> SAGE pretty much all the time. In fact I visited CALIT2 on your campus at
> that time and met Joe OKeefe, Larry and lots of others. Around that time
> Larry also visited here and I did a mini tour with him to Canberra where he
> did an opening event for ANU's OptIPortal, as well as a big event for
> politicians etc. to promote a national optical fibre broadband scheme.
> Larry was the guest speaker and also gave a demo of the OptIPortal. For
> that event, we used CGLX running in Rocks on a "portable" 5x3 OptIPortal
> (belonging to AARNet but built here in our lab). At that time, moving the
> OptIportal onto a different network wasn't really supported and I still
> recall the slight panic of having to reinstall _everything_ about 2 hours
> before the event was supposed to start. It all went well in the end ...
>
> Anyway, because we're also AG enthusiasts here, I gave a fair bit of
> thought about how to integrate AG with CGLX but it never came to anything.
> We've had more success with AG and SAGE. SInce SAGE is based largely on
> streaming, we just run the AG VenueClient anywhere (not on the cluster
> itself) and stream the desktop of that machine to the OptIPortal. Its a
> real network hog for a large desktop (or 3x desktops as equivalent of a
> projected display system) but we have an internal 10G network for that and
> in works pretty well in that environment.
>
> The issue with twisted on Ubuntu is complicated by its dependence on
> particular python versions and by the dependence of various desktop tools &
> apps on both python and twisted - we'd have to supply so many different
> replacement versions of apps, it would almost be like respinning a new
> distribution. However I think just about all of the VenueClient
> functionality is available the way things are - the problem (from memory)
> is with the Venue Server; if you don't need to run the server, then you're
> probably OK. One thing I hadn't thought about, is whether twisted/python
> changes might be more doable on the Ubuntu server release (rather than the
> desktop release which we use as base right now) - the dependency
> considerations would probably be a lot less fraught in the server
> distribution. I'll be looking at making packages for 12.04 fairly soon, so
> at the same time I'll look at how a server based version could work too.
>
> Let me know if you make any progress in the meantime - we've been
> interested in both AG and OptIPortals for quite a while.
>
> chris
>
>
> On 11/04/2013, at 3:34 AM, Ian Kaufman <***@eng.ucsd.edu> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> Long time, no post :) I used to be involved in the community a few years
> back when I was at LBNL/NERSC from 2000 - 2006, being the POC for NERSC's
> "portable in the military sense" AGN.
>
> I have since taken a position aty the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC
> San Diego, and got involved in ROCKS, CGLX and OptIPortals. I have also
> been playing with such tools as Perceus and Warewulf, and building up
> stateless clusters that run in RAM. I am now interested in seeing whether
> or not I can get the AG software to run on a multi-tiled display I manage,
> running CGLX, using Perceus 1.6 and Ubuntu 12.04 with the 3.5 kernel.
>
> So, my questions are - has AG software been tested with CGLX, and, based
> on earlier research into it, has Ubuntu support improved.(i.e. has the
> incompatible version of Twisted in Ubuntu 12.04 been resolved)?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Ian
>
> --
> Ian Kaufman
> Research Systems Administrator
> UC San Diego, Jacobs School of Engineering ikaufman AT ucsd DOT edu
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Precog is a next-generation analytics platform capable of advanced
> analytics on semi-structured data. The platform includes APIs for building
> apps and a phenomenal toolset for data science. Developers can use
> our toolset for easy data analysis & visualization. Get a free account!
>
> http://www2.precog.com/precogplatform/slashdotnewsletter_______________________________________________
> accessgrid-tech mailing list
> accessgrid-***@lists.sourceforge.net
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/accessgrid-tech
>
>
> Christoph Willing +61 7 3365 8316
> Research Computing Centre
> University of Queensland
>
>
>
>
--
Ian Kaufman
Research Systems Administrator
UC San Diego, Jacobs School of Engineering ikaufman AT ucsd DOT edu