Crunching under a VM
12 Dec 2012 4:25:49 UTC
Topic 196679
(moderation:
I'm playing with a couple of distributed computing platforms (everything from BOINC to Plan9) and I use VMs to do testing as to save costs.
For a proof of concept, I have created a nifty pfSense Firewall Appliance, Debian 6 PXE Server, and fancy little Boinc Appliances that auto install. Adding a VM is super easy, and the cool part is, if you are using VirtualBox, you can have a physical network attached to the virtual firewall.
I don't have enough room for a dedicated physical farm, so this does the trick.
Anyone interested in screenshots, config files, appliance files, etc?
Crunching under a VM
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Money is NO object to having a garden, farm, ranch or whatever it is just the ability to build your own machine! If you look by the side of the road you will find TONS of people just sitting their pc's out for the trash man, I have picked up dozens this way! The FIRST thing I do is WIPE the hard drive using DBAN, I do NOT even boot the machine except to DBAN and then wipe the drive. Then I load Windows or Linux and set the machine to crunch if it is good enough or I strip it down and use it for parts for the next one. I used to work part-time and gave over a dozen Linux machines to Foster Kids, thru the local Agency, that I got this way, each one became a tax deduction. As I started 'collecting' friends started giving me their older machines and then finally paying me to swap their stuff over to the new machine they bought. Sometimes I got paid in parts, sometimes in cash. One other place to pick up used pc's is the local dump, I often get nice dual, or even quad, core machines there in the 'too good to throw away' section. They ALL need work, but for me that is easy!! I have had as many as 25 machines running here at my home, but now only have 15 as the gpu's in the machines use too much electricity and I either blowing circuits or the outlet faceplates are getting hot enough to cook on!! Neither is a good thing so I am limited right now!! One thing...when you get over 21 machines total you NEED a Server to say it is boss, otherwise the others compete and have 'issues'! Now my electric bill is between 500 and 600 dollars a month, that is over twice as much as my neighbors!! I live in Northern Virginia and electricity is MUCH cheaper here than on the West Coast. Oh and YES I learned long ago to invest in the local power company, I may as well recoup some of the money I pay them!!
And YES it would be nice to see your setup photos!! I played with some virtual machines once crunching FreeHal, but the Admin limited the total number of real and virtual machines and I moved on to other projects.
I do run a virtual XP running
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I do run a virtual XP running BOINC and Einstein, it's working fine!
Virtual Box is a great tool!
RE: I do run a virtual XP
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I guess you're talking about CPU crunching only?
Didn't manage to figure out how to "attach" say second video card to the VM.
Test4Theory@home uses a
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Test4Theory@home uses a BOINC_VM Virtual Machine to run CERN jobs in a Scientific Linux environment. It uses only 256 MB of your RAM but first you must install VirtualBox.
Tullio
I tested running Oracle Vm
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I tested running Oracle Vm Box with ubunu and Linux only project like Astroids@home ^^ tested too the win2k compatibility for some projects.
DSKAG Austria Research Team: [LINK]http://www.research.dskag.at[/LINK]
RE: RE: I do run a
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Yes, because I run this virtual machine on different computers, most of them don't have crunch-able graphic cards, some have AMD and some have nVidia, so how should I make a setup?
But I like the idea of a virtual GPU ...
I am running Test4Theory@home
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I am running Test4Theory@home om my Linux Box and also a Solaris 11.1 VM doing SETI@home. I installed VirtualBox on it as a second tier Virtual Machine but I could not find an usable Test4Theory app for Solaris.
Tullio
RE: Money is NO object to
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The idea was more for a playground to play with, as I want to create my own science apps. I live in a dorm, so yeah, the room next to me and my own room both share the same circuit. Lol. Plus this room would get hot as Hades during the summer. If I did have my own space, I would totally throw some thrift store machines in the garage and crunch away. I could even use the technologies I'm working with in the virtual environment to help. (PXE Bootable NIC Req'd) You can just build the machine, make sure it POST's, connect to network, walk away.
Pics will come as soon as I get off my butt and screen cap.
I'm actually playing with this, but more specifically the BoincVM image for building a server. Very handy stuff. A cool idea to throw VM's at EC2 and crunch away.
I'm pretty sure the way Oracle does it's virtualization it's next to impossible. I have heard about the possibility of doing it in a XEN Environment.
https://docs.google.com/folde
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https://docs.google.com/folder/d/0B1I5St1RhzHjbl92RWNSQVA1M3c/edit
That's my Google Drive link for the project.
It has a screen cap of the virtual environment.
It also has beta versions of some of the early ideas.
I'll add more soon.