Clutter to Cluster

If your users are clamoring for the power of a data center but your penurious employer tells you to make do with the hardware you already own, don't give up hope. With some some time, a little effort, and a few open source tools, you can transform your mild-mannered desktop systems into a number-crunching super computer. For the impatient, the PelicanHPC Live CD will cobble off-the-shelf hardware into a high-performance cluster in no time.

The PelicanHPC project is the natural evolution of ParallelKnoppix, which was a remastered Knoppix with packages for clustering. Michael Creel developed PelicanHPC for his own research work. Creel was interested in learning about clustering, and because adding packages was so easy, he added PVM, cluster tools like ganglia monitor, applications like GROMACS, and so forth. He also included some simple examples of parallel computing in Fortran, C, Python, and Octave to provide some basic working examples for beginners.

However, the process of maintaining the distribution was pretty time consuming, especially when it came to updating packages such as X and KDE. That's when Creel discovered Debian Live, spent time wrapping his head around the live-helper package, and created a more systematic way to make a Live distro for clustering. So in essence, PelicanHPC is a single script that fetches required packages off a Debian repository, adds some configuration scripts and example software, and outputs a bootable ISO.

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