[MLUG] Quantian info follow-on to PXE booting

[Michael Steffan <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

OK, feelings salved.

http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian.html is the URI/URL for Quantian Central. I see that it hasn't been changed since early 2006. It was pretty impressive then as it is:

A Knoppix / Debian variant tailored to numerical and quantitative analysis.

Quantian is a remastering of Knoppix, the self-configuring and directly bootable cdrom/dvd that turns any pc or laptop (provided it can boot from cdrom/dvd) into a full-featured Linux workstation. Quantian also incorporates clusterKnoppix and adds support for openMosix, including remote booting of light clients in an openMosix terminal server context. 

Brief introductory information is available in a recent paper published in The Political Methodologist, slides from presentations at UseR! 2006 (June 2006), DSC 2005 (August 2005), Usenix 2004 (July 2004), and in the earlier (revised) paper about Quantian that has appeared in the DSC 2003 Proceedings.

Quantian is an extension of Knoppix and clusterKnoppix from which it takes its base system of around gigabytes of software, along with fully automatic hardware detection and configuration. To this, it add about five gigabytes of software.

The clustering project I was involved with aspired to establish a modest and cheap-ish compute engine for economic researchers at a bank. Gigabit Ethernet linked multiple 3 GHz HyperThreading Dell diskless desktop PCs. One full-function PC booted Quantian from a local hard disk, initiated OpenMOSIX, and supported PXE booting of the worker bees. R was the programming environment for massive number crunching of Multiple Markov chains. During our investigation/evaluation period Quantian/OpenMOSIX worked to spread the computation out to available PCs and provided some cluster management/colorful status display support. I believe finance and politics caught up with the project before a full implementation of Quantian/OpenMOSIX, and subsequent clustering efforts went another way.

I would like to second the nomination of Wikipedia's coverage of PXE as being thorough, but not so helpful as the articles to which it links. I tried to include a link to a Linux Magazine (free, registration required) article on network booting in a previous post but lost the bits somewhere along the way.

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