nixCraft Linux Sys Admin Blog

Tutorial: Linux MPI Parallel Clusters Programming

Posted: 18 Apr 2008 08:29 AM CDT

The MPI (Message Passing Interface) is a language-independent communications protocol used to program parallel computers. It allows many computers to communicate with one another. It is used in computer clusters.

The OpenMP (Open Multi-Processing) is an application programming interface (API) that supports multi-platform shared memory multiprocessing programming in C/C++ and Fortran on many architectures, including Unix / Linux and Microsoft Windows platforms. It consists of a set of compiler directives, library routines, and environment variables that influence run-time behavior.

This tutorial explains how to obtain, build, and use an MPI stack for Linux machines. This tutorial will take you from "hello world" to parallel matrix multiplication in a matter of minutes. The exercise takes slightly more than 30 minutes and allows one to develop and run MPI codes on a multi-core server or on a HPC cluster.

OpenMP has several strong points: it is a very simple system to use and it is widely available in compilers for most major platforms. There are however, other methods to express parallelism in your code. On distributed parallel systems, like Linux clusters, the Message Passing Interface (MPI) is widely used. MPI is not a programming language, but rather a standard library that is used to send messages between multiple processes. These processes can be located on the same system (a single multi-core SMP system) or on a collection of distributed servers. Unlike OpenMP, the distributed nature of MPI allows it to work on almost any parallel environment.

MPI in Thirty Minutes

Now Novell Says Linux Consumer Desktop Too Tough

Posted: 18 Apr 2008 07:28 AM CDT

Finally, both Red Hat and Novell is in total agreement - both of them thinks making money with Linux desktop is hard. According to Ron Hovsepian, CEO, Novell India Engineering:

The market for the desktop for the next three to five years is mainly enterprise-related.

As usual, I recommend Ubuntu Linux for both consumer Desktop and Laptop user:

Ubuntu will always be free of charge, including enterprise releases and security updates.
Ubuntu comes with full commercial support from Canonical and hundreds of companies around the world.
Ubuntu includes the very best translations and accessibility infrastructure that the free software community has to offer.
Ubuntu CDs contain only free software applications; we encourage you to use free and open source software, improve it and pass it on.

Understanding Real Time Linux Architecture ( RTOS )

Posted: 18 Apr 2008 07:11 AM CDT

Linux can be used a real time operating system ( RTOS ) for thermostats, household appliance controllers, mobile telephones, industrial robots, spacecraft, industrial control and scientific research equipment.

Linux is not only a perfect platform for experimentation and characterization of real-time algorithms, you can also find real time in Linux today in the standard off-the-shelf 2.6 kernel. You can get soft real-time performance from the standard kernel or, with a little more work (kernel patch), you can build hard real-time applications.

This article explores some of the Linux architectures that support real-time characteristics and discusses what it really means to be a real-time architecture. Several solutions endow Linux with real-time capabilities, and in this article author examine the thin-kernel (or micro-kernel) approach, the nano-kernel approach, and the resource-kernel approach. Finally, author describe the real-time capabilities in the standard 2.6 kernel and show you how to enable and use them.

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Linux yum command deleted

Posted: 18 Apr 2008 06:14 PM CDT

By accident my yum command was deleted under Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 5.x. Now I'm not able to download and update system using RHN. How do I fix this issue without reinstalling RHEL again?

Answer to "Linux yum command deleted"

Accessing A Single iSCSI LUN From Multiple Linux Systems

Posted: 18 Apr 2008 04:22 PM CDT

I'd like to share iSCSI storage with our 3 node web server cluster. How can multiple systems access a single iSCSI LUN under Linux operating system? Can I connect multiple servers to a single iSCSI LUN?

Answer to "Accessing A Single iSCSI LUN From Multiple Linux Systems"