I have access to a 256 CPU Opteron Grid here at work which we plan to run SETI@HOME on occaisionally for ongoing reliability testing and performance analysis.

The current setup is a GB Ethernet LAN connecting:

128 x Dual CPU Opteron Servers running Solaris10 or RHEL3
1 x Quad CPU, Dual Core UltraSPARC IV SunFire V490 server running Solaris10 which we use as a scheduling/monitoring node (running GridEngine/MPICH).

We are still trying to understand how BOINC would best fit into this environment. Initially we hoped we could work out a way for GridEngine to run the BOINC process and schedule jobs across the Grid, but we are now thinking GE would be conflicting with what BOINC is trying to do.

It now looks like we are going to have to treat this setup as a 128 machine LAN rather than a Grid.

The V490 is the only machine with internet access, but it would be trivial to set it up as a proxy to allow all of the compute nodes access to the net.

Does anyone have any experience running SETI/BOINC on a Grid or is the classic LAN approach the way to go ?

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classic LAN approach the way to go ? That´s the only way to get it working.

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classic LAN approach the way to go ? That´s the only way to get it working.

We actually managed to get the job submission and monitoring working through Grid Engine; so one command on the Head node started 128 BOINC processes across the Compute Nodes.
The Compute Nodes then start the SETI application, request work and upload the results themselves, using the head node as the proxy for the net connection.


Not a true grid or a LAN, but somewhere in between - certainly makes kicking everything off much quicker and easier to control.

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