SGI: Hardware

I dunno about Ubuntu, but your display issue would normally be a no-brainer provided you have shared home directories across the boards and are careful to propagate environment variables such as DISPLAY - the shared .Xauthority file would (traditionally) take care of the rest. But I notice my Fedora 16 box doesn't even create .Xauthority, so perhaps in the name of security modern Linux requires you to run "xhost +" ... :/

You already know lots of people have gronked up things to find the lowest loaded host in a set and launch apps accordingly - from very simplistic to baroque. Have you considered something like (Open)MOSIX, that would give you behavior like a single system image? That's consistent with SGIs history on the Onyx/high-end side and lets you focus on the ideas you mentioned about evolving 4Dwm. SSI may get you the display redirection for "free."

More interesting question - you have molds for casting the front panel bits, and measurements/plans for the sheetmetal. Any thought of taking orders...?

OpenMOSIX was great on 2.4-kernels. We ran it a lot(100+ nodes) in my previous workplace (and I think they still do). But for 2.6 it was never really finished, the patches are there and some efforts have been made to tie it all together..

smj wrote: You already know lots of people have gronked up things to find the lowest loaded host in a set and launch apps accordingly - from very simplistic to baroque. Have you considered something like (Open)MOSIX, that would give you behavior like a single system image? That's consistent with SGIs history on the Onyx/high-end side and lets you focus on the ideas you mentioned about evolving 4Dwm. SSI may get you the display redirection for "free."

OpenMOSIX is a good thought, though I am not sure about ARM support. I need to look that up... thanks for the tip. SSI would be awesome as it would be consistent with SGI's modern architectural evolution!

smj wrote: More interesting question - you have molds for casting the front panel bits, and measurements/plans for the sheetmetal. Any thought of taking orders...?

Sure, why not. The casting doesn't capture all the minute details to the point (e.g. the plastic catches on the top rear of the Indigo front panel) where you could just replace an Indigo faceplate with an aluminum one without some grinding and customization. However, I can definitely do the entire case and make everything fit perfectly together in an all metal version. Since the production would be low volume, there will be some cost involved obviously. Depending on interest, I would love to do something like this. What do you think a reasonable price would be for an entire case with faceplate, backplate and the body? Or do you think there would be interest in a completely finished quad-board ARM system like I've built?

Looking good.

Now all you need to do is install RISC OS for it. Linux is too boring for a system like that.

Hmm, I just saw they have a Pandaboard version for RISC OS. Yes, this could be interesting to try out. I'll try to find some time to give it a whirl.

Whoops - sorry, I'd seen that OpenMOSIX was stagnant, but hadn't remembered that it was x86 only - in fact MOSIX.com releases are for x86_64 only. Oh well...

Look at it as an excuse to learn/use MPI!

sgifanatic wrote: What do you think a reasonable price would be for an entire case with faceplate, backplate and the body?

theodric takes careful aim at his foot....

I reckon it would be worth about €400-500 to me as a bare case-- less would be awesome (and could well lead to me ordering two), while more would require careful consideration. I've paid €200 for a normal EATX desktop case, so for a low-volume custom job a greater expense is certainly justified. That said, I have no idea of your total costs to produce-- if you can knock off a whole case for a fiver I think I'd prefer to cut into your profit margin a bit more

Theodric, Thank you for your interest. I will do a little back of the envelope cost calculation and get back to you very soon.

theinonen wrote: Looking good.

Now all you need to do is install RISC OS for it. Linux is too boring for a system like that.

What an absolute pain RISC OS is being... tried it on a Pandaboard and there's something seriously broken. More than an hour to boot, 45 minutes just to log in. Doesn't work right. Will start from scratch and try to figure out what the heck is going on.

In the meanwhile, can someone tell me where I can get 5DWM for Ubuntu? maxxdesktop.com seems to be down.

sgifanatic wrote: The software load balancer I outlined in my initial concept posts about this project has not been done yet. That will probably take a while to do and is a project in its own right. However, once that is done, I should have the ability to run any Linux app and have it automatically distributed to the least loaded node, with display redirection to the "master" Pandaboard connected to the console.

https://computing.llnl.gov/linux/slurm/

I used to manage some compute clusters and I still use this software for a few projects at my current job. It's quite handy and easy to manage. Perhaps it could do what you want without reinventing the wheel?

pierocks wrote:

sgifanatic wrote: The software load balancer I outlined in my initial concept posts about this project has not been done yet. That will probably take a while to do and is a project in its own right. However, once that is done, I should have the ability to run any Linux app and have it automatically distributed to the least loaded node, with display redirection to the "master" Pandaboard connected to the console.

https://computing.llnl.gov/linux/slurm/

I used to manage some compute clusters and I still use this software for a few projects at my current job. It's quite handy and easy to manage. Perhaps it could do what you want without reinventing the wheel?

Thanks for the tip. But based on what I see in the docs ( https://computing.llnl.gov/linux/slurm/faq.html ) I don't think slurm supports X display redirection for interactive apps, does it? Seems to be more of a job scheduler/dispatcher.

For those interested, here is what the back of the case looks like. The four uniform cut-outs are for the Pandaboard HDMI connectors - they appear to be large gaping holes in this pic, but they are not. They are in fact recessed, with a metal sleeve that reaches in and makes contact with the HDMI connectors on the boards, the recessed part that touches the connectors is laser cut to only reveal the connector face, and not expose the rest of the board.

Notice also the single RJ-45 uplink coming out at lower left. That's the uplink from the internal switch.

How cool are these images Credit to my friend [[C-E]] - I am using the desktop background he did for his beloved O2.

Ubuntu showing nekochan and an "indigo" theme. The second image shows two displays connected to the system. With Synergy I can span kb/mouse across all 8 displays. With X redir I can run apps on all 8 screens from a single master system. I am going to add some shared storage via NFS. Need to think of some uber cool applications for the 4 wifi NICs I have in this box... streaming, security... something!

By the way, 5dwm is completely off the radar. The maxxdesktop website is down, archive.org hasn't cached the installable bits and I can't find it ANYWHERE else. If anyone knows where I can get it, please let me know.

Meanwhile, enjoy the pics - these are video screen grabs. I am going to clean up the video some and post it later.

Veeeeeeeery nice!! It is nice to see my background image

sgifanatic wrote:

theinonen wrote: Looking good.

Now all you need to do is install RISC OS for it. Linux is too boring for a system like that.

What an absolute pain RISC OS is being... tried it on a Pandaboard and there's something seriously broken. More than an hour to boot, 45 minutes just to log in. Doesn't work right. Will start from scratch and try to figure out what the heck is going on.

In the meanwhile, can someone tell me where I can get 5DWM for Ubuntu? maxxdesktop.com seems to be down.

It's up right now, but from looking around on their website, they only support x86 and AMD64. It's too bad.