Quantian: A Knoppix remastering for Scientific Computing

[edd]

Announcing the "Quantian Scientific Computing Environment"

A Knoppix / Debian variant tailored to
numerical and quantitative analysis

Quantian is a remastering of Knoppix, the self-configuring bootable cdrom
that turns any pc or laptop into a full-featured Linux workstation. This
version is based on Knoppix 3.2 (2003-05-20), an earlier release based on
Knoppix 3.1 (2003-01-20) is still available; see below for URLs.

Quantian differs from Knoppix by adding a set of programs of interest to
applied or theoretical workers in quantitative or data-driven fields. The
added programs include

o R, including several add-on packages (such as tseries, RODBC, coda,
mcmcpack, gtkdevice, rgtk, rquantlib), out-of-the box support for the
powerful ESS modes for Emacs as well as the Ggobi visualisation program
o Octave with add-on packages octave-forge, octave-sp, octave-epstk,
matwrap and Inline::Octave
o Maxima, including the x11 front-end and emacs support
o the Gnu Scientific Library (GSL) incl example binaries
o the Pari/GP, Gap, Ginac and Yacas computer algebra systems
o the Quantlib quantitative finance library incl. the Python interface
o the OpenDX and Mayavi data visualization systems
o TeXmacs for wysiwyg (La)TeX editing
o and various other programs such apcalc, aribas, autoclass, euler, evolver,
freefem, gambit, geg, geomview, glpk, gnuplot, gperiodic, gmt, gretl,
lp-solve, mcl, multimix, rasmol, plotutils, pgapack, pspp, pdl, rcalc,
yorick and xlispstat

while at the same time retaining programs and features already in Knoppix:

o Auto-configuration of graphics, sound, disks, networking, auxiliary
devices which is second to none among computer installations
o The current version 3.1 of the KDE desktop environment
o The GNU compiler suite comprising gcc, g77, g++ compilers
in releases 2.95, 3.2 and 3.3 as well as gcj in version 3.2
o Perl and Python with loads of add-ons, plus ruby, tcl, ...
o The Emacs and Vim editors, as well as kate, joe, kate, nedit and zile
o A complete teTeX TeX and LaTeX setup for scientific publishing
o Gnumeric, Abiword, Koffice, ... office tools
o a Swiss-army knife collection of networking tools allowing access
to wired and wireless lans, covering ethernet, isdn or dial-up modems

In total, over 1200 Debian packages are included.

Quantian iso images are available at

http://software.biostat.washington.edu/edd/quantian/
http://franz.stat.wisc.edu/~edd/quantian/

and a Quantian overview page, including a recent paper, is at

http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian.html

Plans for future versions are not set in stone but may entail support for
OpenMosix clustering. Comments, questions, feedback are more than welcome!

-- Dirk Eddelbuettel <[email protected]> Wed, 28 May 2003 18:42:40 -0500

[Henk Poley]

Plans for future versions are not set in stone but may entail support for
OpenMosix clustering. Comments, questions, feedback are more than welcome!

Then I would suggest exchanging ideas with clusterKnoppix.

[A. Jorge Garcia]

Nice website! Sounds like you have a winner there. Do you think you would benefit more from openmosix or beowolf?

Regards,

[psoares]

This is just what I've been looking for!

I think that the removal of OpenOffice is not a good choice. KOffice and the Gnome equivalent (GNumeric+?) are still very imature compared to it. I know the size is an issue but can't you cut out something else?

In the TODO list there's a mention to GRI. I took a quick look at it and it looked less powerful than GLE. Can this one be considered?

Is there a complete list of (scientific, at least) packages included?

Paulo Soares
___________________
[email protected]

[humberto]

I've put up (I believe) a bittorrent of the Quantian 0.3 iso:

http://daleth.hpcf.upr.edu:6883/metainfo.torrent

Enjoy!

[dolphin]

psoares

Take a look at http://bofh.be/clusterknoppix/doc/ts/

If you want to have all the 'normal' knoppix apps and the Quantian apps in one big image that can be used to boot your clients from. (via the openmosix terminal server)

--Wim

[A. Jorge Garcia]

I read everthing I could get my hands on from

http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian.html

and joined the listserv there but I'm not getting any traffic. So I thought I'd post my QUANTIAN query here.

I tried QUANTIAN from CD on my router at home and successfully linked 4 PCs in a cluster. I tried it with my students at school with 25 PCs using, yes, 25 CDs and got it working over the DHCP server there.

Now, I'd like to install QUANTIAN to the hd and have all the PCs link to eachother at boot-up as they did with the cd. I have no success, however. I see no dox on how to have openMOSIX start up at boot-up when hdinstalled. What am I missing here?

What I'd like to do eventually is to have all the PCs PXE boot off one server and have them all running openMOSIX right away. Is this doable?

Now, for the real question. Say I get all the PCs in my classroom linked-up this way. Is there a simple app you can suggest that needs so much processing power that I can demonstrate how this works and why we want this to work to my students? BTW, I have 25 Pentium IV 2.4 GHz PCs each with about 750 MB of RAM in my classroom on a 10Mbps LAN.

TIA,
AJG

[johnb]

To avoid errors openmosix will do best on it own network ip range. The default ip is 192.168.0.xxx. The master ideally has 2 nics one for openmosix use and one for communication with other networks.

10Mbps LAN is to small for 25 computers. 100Mbps is better. 1000Mbps is best. A switch over a hub is preferable.

Clusterknoppix/Quantain/KlusTrix will set-up it own dhcp server. Best not to mix it up with another dhcp server. Sys. Admins generally dont like uknown/multiple services running. See my first sentence.

What I'd like to do eventually is to have all the PCs PXE boot off one server and have them all running openMOSIX right away. Is this doable?

Yes, if your computers support pxe booting. check the bios. You will also need to know the network driver of you network cards.

To check the status of your openmosix box type:

/etc/init.d/openmosix status

You can also do an:

/etc/init.d/openmosix restart

and check for any error messages.

As for your "real" question, the openmosix website has community contributions section. There is plenty to choose from and growing all the time.
johnb

[A. Jorge Garcia]

Thanx for your help, johnb!

OK, in essence what you are telling me is to get all the PCs for a cluster off the DHCP server by giving them all static ips? I did this to one machine in the lab so my students and I could login to it not only from school but from home and this worked well. I saw your HOWTO that mentioned using the ip range 192.168.x.x so I suppose that was setting the static ips. Could this also be the problem I'm having getting PXE boot to work? If I setup all the static ips, the DHCP server won't get in the way, right? Whenever I try to PXE boot all the clients get is the DHCP server, not the KNOPPIX Terminal Server.

The only problem is that I share this lab with teachers who need WIMPdoze, so this is a dual boot situation. If I set static ips for all my PCs in Linux, that's not going to affect these PCs in WIMPdoze, right? IE: at boot-up, my settings in ifconfig under Linux will not affect the DHCP settings for WIMPdoze.

I've got a bit of a truce going with the tech guys at school. I can do whatever I want on the Linux partition as long as I don't mess with their WIMPdoze installs. Thats why they got me this new lab to play with where half of each hdd (20GB) is reserved for Linux! My student's Linux boxes were geting in the way of the tech guys, so now we can play nice.

...can't we all just get along?

TIA,
AJG

[johnb]

In essence what I am telling you Clusterknoppix/Quantain/KlusTrix will set-up it own dhcp server. There is no need for static ips, except for the master. There are a number of different services that get set-up in order for clustering to work.
PXE is not enabled by default on most boxes I have seen. LAN & Network are some of the choices in the bios that need to be set to boot first.
As an example: getting KnoppixLive Cd to boot, the CDROM should be set to be the first to boot.
You need to go thru the bios carefully I have seen as many as 3 places that it needs to be enabled in order for PXE to work properly.
johnb