reclaimed operations

...but we hack on.

my life and psychological health have taken a bit of a beating very recently. sadly, it has gotten to the point that it's affected my ability to focus on any projects outside of my 9-5.

Fear not, my fellow benders-of-wrenches... I will rebound, probably pretty quickly.

But today, just today (well, and part of yesterday) is f***ed up in my reality.

digging into specs, i'm going to shuffle ram around to make a couple of 512mb ram nodes.

256mb of ram barely installs ubuntu server and opensshd.

it runs great, install was SLOW.

At this point, I'm going with https://www.mpich.org/static/downloads/3.1.4/mpich-3.1.4-installguide.pdf something along these lines. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MpichCluster looks like something i might be able to pull off.

I'm going to work with just ubuntu server and mpich as a start. following that, once it's confirmed that I have a working cluster, we need to benchmark it.

this batch of machines were in various states of runs or doesn't... so I'm going to monkey around with them until I get at least 3 working nodes. I may ditch doubling the ram per node in the end, we'll see...

BONUS! several of these have halfway decent ethernet cards in them.

LINPACK? what is this...? *staggers off into the night*

development on so many things at once, and that's not including my day job.

as i type this, I'm installing ubuntu server on the first of these boxes.

let's see how it goes! (updates to come through the evening)

also, let's see if I can find a long enough cat5 cable for this machine so I don't have to move it.

Six machines, I've powered one up and tried to boot from usb, and the bios was just a tad bit too old to support that. So I'm looking at bios flashing or burning a cd... which I know i have a blank cd around here... somewhere.

Shortly after, I powered up the slightly more impressive cased machine, to find it had twice the ram. For those not paying attention, no... I'm not checking inside these before i plug them in, I'm brave like that. Again, no dice on the USB boot.

more to come!