Roger Ignazio: MP251, Fall 2008
Render Farm
[COSI wiki]This semester, I have been focusing a great deal of my time on developing a render farm to be used by the Digital Arts & Sciences program here at Clarkson. After we acquired 10 PCs that were once used in a Rowley lab, I networked them together and performed base installs of Ubuntu 8.04 to be used as slaves, and performed a base + X11 install on the master. After further consideration, the server needs to be able to use software RAID to control several hard drives to be used for rendered image storage. Because of this, we have decided to move to CentOS 5.2 for a server operating system.
End of semester update: The render farm is not currently operational, but should be by the beginning of next semester. This decision was reached by the render farm project members, as it won't be full utilized until the middle of the Spring 2009 semester. Currently, we're looking into the possibility of moving from our original plan of running a Linux build on each render node to deploying Chris Hawkins' LoadBalanceLinuxCluster suite, which would allow each render node to be diskless (PXE boot), letting us change packages and deploy updates/patches much more easily.
Honeypot
[COSI wiki]What started out as a project with great intentions for this semester has fallen short recently as I have shifted focus to the render farm. The render farm project, when complete, will directly impact students here at Clarkson, and create more free time on computers in the CEC as they'll no longer need to render Maya animations. When the render farm project is complete, I hope to continue the honeypot project, but even interest at COSI meetings lately has seemed low. Two members left the honeypot team, and the two remaining members (Chris Lane and myself) are actively working on the render farm.
End of semester update: This project ended up getting abandoned by its members. I could not find the time to work on it, and Mukund sent me an e-mail about 3/4 of the way through the semester stating he would no longer be working on it as well. I sent out an e-mail to members who expressed an interest in the honeypot project, and no one replied. As of this writing (2 Dec 2008) the honeypot machines are still in COSI, but they should be moved back downstairs shortly.