sun
Stellenbosch gets high-performance Linux cluster South Africa’s Stellenbosch University now has a high-performance Sun Fire cluster running OpenSuse Linux, courtesy of Breakpoint Solutions. The high performance cluster is built using Sun Fire X4150 servers, with each having two Intel Quad Core CPUs and 16 gigabytes of memory. The cluster includes a Sun StorageTek 2530 array with six terabytes of storage, an Extreme Networks Summit 1GBE switch and the Sun Grid Engine job scheduler. “There are 168 cores in total,” says mechanics division head within the department of mechanical and mechatronic engineering, professor Gerhard Venter. “In testing we have been using between 80 and 120 cores at any given time and without any problems.” Venter says “the university had no shared resource for this before. Instead, various departments ran their own box-clusters that typically have less than 20 cores. These are used to crunch numbers in research in fields such as chemistry and physics.” He says that several departments within the university have already begun testing the solution in their research projects. “Mechanical and mechatronic engineering, electrical and electronic engineering, computer science, bio-chemistry, physics and applied mathematics are just some of the departments that will be loading the system with work once the testing phase is done,” says Venter.
I will probably expand on this at some stage, so for now it's going to be short, but I recently put Debian onto a Sun Netra, which was pretty cool, but I decided to cross-grade from Debian to Ubuntu which I've done before without having any issues, and I ran into issues. Tons of them in fact. But only one was bad enough that I almost gave up, and by bad enough I mean that anybody who is good with dpkg would have solved this quickly but no matter how hard I searched (at first), all I could find was whining about how if you have this problem it's your own fault because you've mixed Debian and Ubuntu, but not giving any clues as to how to solve the problem. I had mixed the two, but I also hadn't. My /etc/apt/sources.list had only Ubuntu sources, but some of the software on the machine was Debian. Anyway to get to the point if you have this problem:
Selecting previously deselected package sysvutils.
(Reading database ... 168107 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking sysvutils (from .../sysvutils_2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu9_i386.deb) ...
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/sysvutils_2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu9_i386.deb (--unpack):
trying to overwrite `/usr/share/man/man1/mesg.1.gz', which is also in package sysvinit
Errors were encountered while processing:
/var/cache/apt/archives/sysvutils_2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu9_i386.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
Then please fix it by doing the following:
$ sudo dpkg --force-overwrite -i /var/cache/apt/archives/sysvutils_2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu9_i386.deb(Reading database ... 168508 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking sysvutils (from .../sysvutils_2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu9_i386.deb) ...
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/usr/share/man/man1/mesg.1.gz', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/usr/share/man/man1/last.1.gz', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/usr/share/man/man1/lastb.1.gz', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/usr/share/man/man8/pidof.8.gz', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/usr/share/man/man8/killall5.8.gz', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/usr/bin/last', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/usr/bin/mesg', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/sbin/killall5', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/usr/bin/lastb', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/bin/pidof', which is also in package sysvinit
Setting up sysvutils (2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu9) ...
And when you are done, thank these guys.
Updated: it appears that somebody other than me is actually reading my website, so I wanted to make a point of noting that the problem I had was exactly as above, but obviously not with i386 debs, so please don't try fixing it exactly as pasted above, but rather apply that to a sparc64 setup. I'm kinda thinking that if you're having this issue then you already knew that, but I had to mention it :)