Infrastructure:Sunway

Sunway was a 19 node cluster VTLUUG runs for general use. Each machine uses local storage, although it may use something unified later on. Westinghouse is accessible from a public IPv4, the rest are accessible only from IPv6.

Sunway was transfered to WUVT in winter of 2016.

For more history, see VTLUUG:Beowulf Cluster

Configuration

The sunway cluster is managed via ansible and has a number of libraries and distcc installed. It is free for anyone to use, with their VTLUUG credentials. Be aware there is limited disk space on these machines.

distcc

The idea behind the cluster was to use it for distributed builds. Each cluster machine is running distccd and supports pump. If you would like to build something on the cluster download the source to your home directory. The process may change based on the project but to use pump (I would use it) and distcc do the following.

  pump make -j76 HOSTCC="distcc cc" HOSTCXX="distcc c++" CC="distcc cc" CXX="distcc c++"

The 76 is the level of parallelism decided upon by distcc, you can find it yourself by running:

  distcc -j

Pump is a distcc utility that distributes the preprocessing as well as the compilation. The linux kernel with "defconfig" and "bzImage" produced a speed up factor of 4.36.