RCE 16: Rocks Clusters

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Created on Thursday, 27 August 2009 23:03

Written by Brock Palen

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Brock Palen and Jeff Squyres speak with Mason Katz and Greg Bruno of UCSD (University of California San Diego)  about the Rocks Cluster (http://www.rocksclusters.org/) distribution.

Greg Bruno is a core architect and developer of the Rocks Cluster Distribution and he has been involved with the project since its inception. Over the past 10 years, Rocks has helped "make clusters easy" for scientists from around the world as proven by the Rocks Cluster Registration Page (www.rocksclusters.org/register) where, as of August 2009, over 1,200 clusters have been voluntarily registered. Additionally, Rocks has been recognized by the HPC community by winning six HPCwire awards. He has co-authored four refereed technical conference papers on the topic of Rocks. Dr. Bruno received his Ph.D. from the University of California at San Diego in Computer Science in 2008. Prior to co-founding the Rocks Development Group, he worked at NCR where he developed cluster management software for systems that support the world's largest databases. During his 10 year employment at NCR, he co-authored three awarded patents (Patent Numbers:6,119,159 - 6,308,207 - 6,081,812).

Mason J. Katz is currently the Group Leader for Cluster Development for the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California (UCSD). Mr. Katz received his BS in Systems Engineering from the University of Arizona. He worked for five years as an embedded software engineer on networks of lightning detection sensors. Following this his spent three years working at the University of Arizona on network security protocols (IPSec), and operating systems (x-kernel, Scout). Recently he has spent the last six years working on Windows and Linux commodity clustering (HPVM, Rocks). The focus of his current work is on the Rocks Clustering Distribution, a complete software stack building high performance computing clusters. Rocks has an international user community of several thousand users, and has an international development team of a dozen software developers. In addition, Mr. Katz is actively involved in Pacific Rim Applications and Grid Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA) having served as co-chair for two meetings, and as co-lead for the Resources Working Group.