Introduction to High Performance Computing Cluster

High Performance Computing Cluster aka Supercomputers, after working for 4 years in this domain( Administration of HPC Cluster) I could say, this is not as challenging job as its sounds (Supercomputer).Its all about configuration, some people take days, some takes months and some could take years depending on knowledge and experience but ultimately every one can setup these clusters.

HPC Clusters are basically individual machines connected with network and have softwares installed in client server way. There are basically two ways of setting up cluster, one is to use management softwares in which some are proprietary (like InClus, HP CMU) and some are open source (like Rocks, XCat). Second way is to setup cluster manually. In this tutorial we will use the manual approach, reason is it will give us better insights of HPC configuration.

To understands these tutorials you should have hands on experience on Linux Administration, Network Protocols and Python Programming Language(Could Benefit). We will cover following topics in details:

1. DHCP ( Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol )
2. Network Boot ( TFTP )
3. NFS ( Network File Sharing Protocol )
4. Torque Scheduler ( Xeon Phi and GPGPU Configuration )
5. Ganglia ( Cluster Monitoring Tool )
6. OFED ( Infiniband Software )

These 6 things is all you need to setup manual cluster, we will go through all these topics in details in coming tutorials.

To all the security professional who are following this blog, this topic is really important if you are working on some password cracking algorithm, brute force, DOS or anything which requires processing power of CPU, by setting up such clusters at your home you could execute program in parallel( using processing power of more then one machine at the same time).

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Abhishek.

Heartbleed – OpenSSL Zero-day Bug leaves Millions of websites Vulnerable

It is advised to those who are running their web server with OpenSSL 1.0.1 through 1.0, then it is significantly important that you update to OpenSSL 1.0.1g immediately or as soon as possible.

As this afternoon, an extremely critical programming flaw in the OpenSSL has been discovered that apparently exposed the cryptographic keys and private data from some of the most important sites and services on the Internet. Read more….

Python Socket Programming Tutorial (4)

Hello everyone, In last three tutorials we learn about the socket declaration, server socket and client socket configuration. In coming tutorials I will share examples like web server, client server chat program.Let’s cover all the basic topics first before examples.

In this tutorial we will cover Address look up function,

1) gethostbyname(hostname): It translate the host name to a IPV4 format. The IPV4 address is returned as a string such as 10.10.10.1. It does not support IPV6.

2) gethostbyname_ex(hostname): Translate the host name to IPv4 address format, extended interface. Return a triple (hostname, alias list, IP address list). It also does not support IPV6.

3) gethostname(): Return a string containing the host name of the machine where the python interpreter is currently executing. If you want to know the current machine IP address, you have to use gethostbyname(gethostname()).

4) getfqdn(name): Return a fully qualified domain name for name. If name is omitted or empty, it is interpreted as localhost.

5) gethostbyaddress(IP address): Return a triple (hostname, alias list, IP address list). It support both IPV4 and IPV6.

6) getnameinfo(sockaddr, flags): Translate a sockaddr into a 2 tuple (host, port) depending on the setting of flags. The result contain a fqdn or numeric address representation of host.

7) socket.getprotobyname(protocol name): Translate an internal protocol name to a constant suitable for passing as the third argument to the socket function. This is usually needed for a socket opened in a raw mode, for normal socket mode the correct protocol is chosen automatically.

8) getservbyname(service name [, protocol name]: Translate an internal service name and protocol name to a port number for that service. The optional protocol name, if given should be tcp or udp otherwise any protocol will match.

9) getservbyport(port [, protocol name]: Translate an internal port number and protocol name to a service name for that service.

These are some function. 7, 8 and 9 are not useful to us but other are really important and very useful we will cover them all in the example.

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Abhishek.