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Cluster Progress

Posted on 2015-02-19 by Matthew Lugg

At the Raspberry Pi Jam on Saturday the 14th I was working on creating a cluster supercomputer with a piece of software, GNU Parallel. It was successful, and I did a test with the prime number generator Paul made. It seems to require me to copy all files involved to all computers involved. However, it appears around 40% faster when using two computers instead of just one.

It appears that GNU Parallel has trouble finding the amount of cores on each computer, which is likely the reason for Paul’s inital results, which showed not using parallel to be faster. For all computers it says ‘Could not find the amount of cpu’s on 192.168.1.x, using 1’. It is possible to specify to parallel how many cores computers have, so I will research this.

At Minecraft club on Wednesday, we attempted to link Parkfield’s netbooks together with their switch. We discovered something extremely odd; the Linux netbooks there, along with one of the laptops from Raspberry Pi jams, do not have OpenSSH Server (sshd) installed, even though it is meant to be installed by default on Linux. One of the netbooks wouldn’t let us install it either, but that didn’t really matter – it just meant we had to use parallel on that machine instead of another. We didn’t get time to run a test, but we should have time next Wednesday.

Although so far we have just used GNU Parallel with a python program, it can be extremely useful. For example if you have a password-protected archive with important files, but you forgot the password, you can decrypt the folder much quicker with more processing power.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments
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2 thoughts on “Cluster Progress”

  1. Ole Tange says:
    2015-02-26 at 12:38 am

    GNU Parallel uses GNU Parallel to determine the number of cpus on a machine. Is GNU Parallel installed on the slaves?

    Reply
    • Matthew Lugg says:
      2015-02-26 at 8:14 am

      No,I didn’t know that’s how it worked. Will try that next Wednesday, should get better performance.

      Reply

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