PelicanHPC GNU/Linux LiveCD 1.8 Released

Michael Creel updated today his PelicanHPC Linux distribution to version 1.8, which introduces a couple of improvements, some new tools/features and various bug fixes. PelicanHPC is a Live CD distro based on the Debian mammoth, which aims to simplify the setup of a high-performance computing cluster. Without further introduction, here are the changes since the last development version of PelicanHPC:

· Support for ISO images and USB disk images was added to the make_pelican tool;
· In order to set a password that allows the use of permanent storage, a dialog was added;
· Binary blobs were added for proprietary NICS;
· Added console-common, mail packages and locales;
· Added some symlinks that will support the applications compiled with an old version of OpenMPI;
· The tutorial was updated.

About PelicanHPC

PelicanHPC is a Debian-based Live CD Linux distribution that lets everyone easily set up a high-performance computing cluster in a few minutes. The resulting Pelican cluster will allow you to do parallel computing with the help of MPI. While the frontend node boots directly from the CD image, the compute nodes will boot by PXE (Preboot Execution Environment) utilizing the frontend node as the server. The ISO image of PelicalHPC Linux is created using the Debian Live infrastructure. Here are some of the most important features of PelicanHPC:

· Based on Debian Lenny Linux;
· XFCE4 desktop environment;
· Konqueror web browser and file manager;
· KSysguard cluster monitoring tool;
· Kate graphical text editor;
· ano command-line text editor;
· Created using Debian Live;
· Includes the OpenMPI and LAM-MPI implementations of MPI (32-bit and 64-bit);
· Includes extensive example applications using MPITB and GNU Octave.
· Includes the Linpack HPL benchmark;
· Any Class C network can be used (default cluster is on 10.11.12.*).

Download PelicanHPC 1.8 right now from Softpedia.