Customisable features
Ainkaboot KlustOS is designed such that the deployed operating system only contains the necessary programs for the desired operation. Extending functionality is simple and rapid. All necessary programs are pre-installed to provide the desired functionality.
Available Programs and functionality
We are able to provide any open source program which runs on Linux on KlustOS and a wide range of proprietary applications. Some example programs which we recommend are:
- Distributed Rendering - DrQueue
- Message Passing - MPICH2
- Website Serving - Apache
- Database Back-end - MySQL
- Distributed Compiling - DistCC
How KlustOS works - Example Situations
Distributed Render Farm
The visual effects industry - incorporating graphics design for advertisement, film and television, architecture and digital enhancement - encompasses a wide range of computer aided design. Many of these are copmutationally intensive applications, require large amounts of processing power to achieve the desired results.
Application Focus - DrQueue
One suitable application which KlustOS can be installed with is DrQueue. DrQueue is an open source program designed to provide queueing facilities and batch distribution for a cluster. A highly cross platform application designed to run on Irix, Linux, OS x, FreeBSD and Windows. DrQueue original design focused on providing distributed rendering and can plug right in to an existing setup with script generators available for a huge range of proprietary applications used in the graphics industry. These include Maya, Blender, Mantra, Lightwave and many more.
Developing additional features is straight foreward and Ainkaboot's partnership with DrQueue allows us to provide support directly in conjunction with the developer.
URL: http://drqueue.org
Message Passing
Message passing environments allow distribution of processes at an application level, providing a means to speed up applications and especially useful for simple linearly scalable applications such as Monte Carlo simulation. In programming "for" loops provide a means to repeat the same task multiple times in such cases where one iteration is independent of the next parallelising the code provides a simple scalable means of speeding up computation.
Numerous industries make use of parallel processing or could benefit in providing the power necessary for their computations. Financial institutions make use of Monte Carlo for option pricing and other financial products.
Application Focus - MPICH
Message Passing Interface (MPI) is one industry standard implementation for message passing environments. Numerous different environments are available for KlustOS and they can all be installed in parallel or just the necessary implementation.
URL: http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/
Distributed Compiling
Compiling is an intensive process requiring lots of CPU time. For large applications, header libraries, game engines and numerous other programs, the amount of code can be phenomenal and compiling this code can take a significant amount of time.
By distributing compiling it is possible to reduce the time associated with a recompile.
Application Focus - DistCC
DistCC is included in KlustOS by default and distributes compiling across the cluster when installing new applications and can also be used when compiling a kernel. One key use of distcc is it can be used for cross compiling making it possible to compile an application for one architecture on another. This is useful for developing embedded applications which often run on less powerful processors. We also see an application in games console development.
DistCC works with GCC, but is compatible with the Intel compiler and some other compliant compilers, check the distcc website for more information. DistCC is designed for C and C++ distribution.