He typed his regular user name rather the administrator's one, since he had no system maintenance tasks to perform today. A few more lines with a geeky welcoming message and the terminal's version scrolled by after his password was confirmed. Another similar cluster with all the tangled cables and in an alike dimly-lighted room, was waiting for a connection on the other side of the world, somewhere on Japan's island territory. They where going to connect the two machines and try for double the processing power, only that he needed to find a fast and clear routing over the net for that purpose.
He thought that since it was Mardi-Gras down in New Orlean's today, most people would be out rummaging the streets, and there was a high chance to get an almost empty ethernet from there to the trans-pacific line. It was easy to locate the to the path to the New Orleans servers from the routing tables stored on his cluster, and the ping to the machine in Japan took just a couple of milliseconds to returns. With a faster connection that he had hoped for, he fired up his secure shell and soon he show the prompt for login from the other side.
An account, set up for him from his peer over on the other side of the ocean let him though, and before he even had time to think, a "Welcome man, where'd you found that wicked line ???" poped up in the intra-messaging system.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Monday, June 9, 2008
unixman interacts with the cluster 1
He opened the door and went though to the dimply lit room where the rack of computer boxes occupied almost a third of it, in the corner away from the single window. A pair of flat LCD monitors lay attached to each other on the desk with a single chair that took up the remaining space. It was already dark outside, and no light other than that of a single desk lamp was reflected on the walls. He needed to absorb no more photons other than the ones emitted from the screen, and maybe some needed for the occasional search of the Control or Alt buttons on the keyboard.
The computer rack was an assortment of colors, each computer box with its own shape too; the "servers" as they called them, even though they didn't serve any data to anyone outside the company, rather than doing the opposite and collecting data from the web for the people that operated them. Fumbling through the maze of cables that came out allover the front of the boxes to connect them to each other, he found the master switch for the rack and flicked it. Almost at the same time, with a few of them trailing behind at a couple of random positions on the rack, he could hear the machines booting up with the whirring sounds of their CPU fans and movable
parts of their drives filling up the room.
He sat on the chair with his hands resting over the keyboard, idle while he observed the lines rolling by across the screen, as the different daemons confirmed their correct register with the kernel. This kernel of the operating system was custom built by his group to be over=clocked and efficient, containing only the minimums that controlled the processors across the machines. Soon the lines had stop scrolling by, and a blinking cursor was prompting him to enter a login name for this
computer cluster.
The computer rack was an assortment of colors, each computer box with its own shape too; the "servers" as they called them, even though they didn't serve any data to anyone outside the company, rather than doing the opposite and collecting data from the web for the people that operated them. Fumbling through the maze of cables that came out allover the front of the boxes to connect them to each other, he found the master switch for the rack and flicked it. Almost at the same time, with a few of them trailing behind at a couple of random positions on the rack, he could hear the machines booting up with the whirring sounds of their CPU fans and movable
parts of their drives filling up the room.
He sat on the chair with his hands resting over the keyboard, idle while he observed the lines rolling by across the screen, as the different daemons confirmed their correct register with the kernel. This kernel of the operating system was custom built by his group to be over=clocked and efficient, containing only the minimums that controlled the processors across the machines. Soon the lines had stop scrolling by, and a blinking cursor was prompting him to enter a login name for this
computer cluster.
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