Episode 409 - HappyHakoween: Password Cracking Clusters, Remote Control Services

[davmoo]

Good episode.

My only disappointment was Snubsie only did one segment in those cute bunny ears. Well, that, and the part where I laughed so hard I sprayed iced tea all over the TV set during the show opening when you announced the last sponsor...gotta learn to not take a drink until after the show officially starts.

I agree, it was cool!.

[sembazuru]

For your Beowulf cluster, why not try to incorporate some PS3's into it. You can find them cheap (and hopefully working) on ebay, or get a couple new ones for $400/ea at your store of choice. Hak5 viewers can even donate their old PS3 when they upgrade (like send you their 20GB version because they decide they actually need the on-board WiFi for the upcoming AdHocParty feature). There are a couple academic clusters that I know of that are PS3 based being used instead of buying time on super computers. (~$3000 (8*$400 + extras) for unlimited use instead of ~$5,000 per supercomputer run.) Here are some links with explanations:

PS3 Gravity Grid at UMass@Dartmoth being used for gravity wave modeling calculations. Started as an 8 PS3 cluster, currently a 16 PS3 cluster. I found a citation on the web claiming that in it's original configuration of 8 PS3s it had comparable computing power to 200 Blue Gene supercomputing nodes. Unfortunately, this site is quite sparse on the details:
http://gravity.phy.umassd.edu/ps3.html
Read this Wired article for an amusing story on how the first 8 PS3's were obtained:
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news..._supercomputer

NC State University has what is considered the first PS3 cluster. (I haven't done any date comparisons myself, so I don't truly know who was (on) first.) This is their press release, sparse on details:
http://moss.csc.ncsu.edu/~mueller/cluster/ps3/coe.html
But, this page goes more into depth of what the systems specs are, what OS and software is being used, etc. Looks like the target audience for this page is students at NCSU wanting to use the cluster:
http://moss.csc.ncsu.edu/~mueller/cluster/ps3/

Here is a PDF of a power point given for a symposium at University of Alaska Fairbanks that goes into some of the hows and whys. (Probably better as a backdrop to a talk instead of what we get by just looking at the slides.) There are some interesting bench marking slides near the end:
http://www.arsc.edu/science/multicore/Nosum_PS3.pdf

Here is what you can buy from Terra Soft, useful for seeing what software they use. They use a non PS3 computer as the head node, probably because of the 256MB RAM limitation of the PS3... Not that I'm suggesting plunking down the +$17K Terra Soft is asking (that's a lot of stickers), but more of a resource to see how others are doing it.
http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/st...ware&submitimg[hardware][solutions]=1

Now, after all that, I'm not sure how well PS3s in your cluster would work with what you want to crunch on the cluster. But it might be interesting to see how adding 1 or 2 PS3s from eBay to your cluster changes the performance. What tasks are greatly enhanced by have the PS3s there, what tasks work the same (or worse) with the PS3s there. Etc.

[bani-banan]

^ Copied and pasted that onto a document for future need.

Thanks for the info