Mashed Articles

However you slice it, the PC processor business this year has been all about Intel. First came a revolutionary dual-core chip with a graphics processor shoehorned into the CPU package. At the other end of the scale, a new six-core monster has made Intel’s position at the top of the performance table look even more unassailable. Meanwhile, AMD’s CPU division has released, well, very little. Minor revisions of its dual and quad-core chips has been your lot.

That is about to change. By the time you read these words, AMD will have unleashed its own hexa-core desktop processor, known as Thuban. Based on AMD’s ageing Hammer platform, it won’t be enough to scare Intel’s finest. We’ll have to wait until 2011 and the arrival of AMD’s new Bulldozer CPU architecture before there’s any chance of that happening, but Thuban should make for an interesting addition in the meaty mid-range of the CPU market.

Of course, I’ve chewed the fat regarding the prospects for Bulldozer in PC Pluses passim. But it’s actually the chip scheduled to arrive between Thuban and Bulldozer that should mark the beginning of AMD’s renaissance. Codenamed Llano and due late this year or early next, it’s AMD’s first stab at a CPU-GPU ‘fusion’ processor. Intel may have beaten AMD to market with such a device, but it’s looking like AMD might have the edge.

For starters, AMD has much better graphics technology than Intel. That’s unlikely to change any time soon, given the recent cancellation of Larrabee, Intel’s stillborn effort to engineer a stand-alone graphics processor. Indeed, thanks to some recent disclosures from AMD, the full implications of its superiority in graphics are becoming clearer. Images of the Llano die have been circulating and reveal that the graphics core is big. Really big. It consumes nearly half the available die space. Remember, this is a 32nm quad-core processor. That means AMD has invested lots of transistors in the graphics.

Extrapolating from such images is always perilous, but I’m confident it will be by far the most powerful integrated graphics chip ever. To put it into context, the fastest integrated graphics core AMD currently makes has 40 stream processors. Llano is thought to have as many as 480, making it over 10 times as powerful. Indeed, the Llano graphics core looks more powerful than AMD’s fastest discrete desktop GPU of just a couple of years ago, the Radeon HD 2900.

Comparisons with Intel’s current Westmere fusion chips are tricky, not least because they are dual-die constructions combining a 32nm dual-core processor with a 45nm graphics chip in a single package. Suffice to say that in terms of rendering grunt, Westmere doesn’t even rank as the most powerful current integrated GPU, much less threaten Llano. Of course, by the time Llano appears Intel will be tooling up for its upcoming Sandy Bridge family of chips. Like Llano, Sandy Bridge derivatives will be quad-core, single-die chips. Intriguingly, die shots reveal the graphics core in Sandy Bridge represents at most one fifth of its total area.

All of which means we have two very different looking approaches from AMD and Intel when it comes to fusion processors. You could say each plays to its strengths. AMD has great graphics and relatively weak CPUs, so stuffing a big GPU into its fusion processor allows for a strong narrative. Want a great visual experience from your low-end PC? Then you need AMD. Meanwhile, Intel will be emphasising the superiority of its traditional CPUs, something it will have no problem demonstrating.

On the desktop, it looks like a win for Intel. Anybody who wants serious graphics power will simply drop in a discrete video card (though there’s a good chance that video card will come from AMD). It’s a different story for laptop PCs, however. Power use is the driving factor here, and that means a heavyweight discrete GPU is a non-starter. Likewise, outright CPU performance is less of an issue for mobile systems.

What AMD will therefore be able to offer is a more balanced package. Its CPU won’t be the fastest, but it will be good enough. Meanwhile, it will have by far the best integrated graphics core, all the better for everything from gaming to high definition video playback. What’s more, if general processing on the GPU ever takes off, well, that will just be gravy. All this, of course, is before the arrival of AMD’s new Bulldozer CPU architecture. If that’s any good, Intel really will be under pressure.

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This month, it’s time to give your computer the biggest spring clean of its life, as we show you how to declutter, polish up and kick Windows into a beautiful new world of fast performance and instant gratification. You’ll also join us as we surf the 2020 internet to find where the online revolution will take us next, and discover 20 amazing things you didn’t know you could do with Twitter, from playing games to giving your household appliances a voice.

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The future of scalable, distributed computing is in the cloud. This is a nebulous concept that’s supposed to describe a cloud’s perpetual elasticity in providing online storage, processing and bandwidth. There are user-facing cloud services such as Google’s web-based applications, the Ulteo online desktop and Canonical’s One service for silently cross-computer folder synchronicity. And there are the more ambitious services of Amazon’s EC2 platform, enabling websites like Facebook to expand and contract their resource requirements in realtime, catering for peaks and troughs in demand and only paying for the capacity and the CPU cycles it actually uses.

Tux: the ideal combination of experienced mountain climber and feathered networking expert.

This latter kind of cloud is a big enterprise oriented subject, and Facebook-like scenarios are way off the scale when it comes to the ordinary Linux user. But Linux is at the heart of many of these installations, and there’s plenty of enterprise cloud technology left lying around for us mortals to play with. Incredibly, considering it’s user-friendly approach to Linux, that includes the latest release of Ubuntu.

Ubuntu 9.10 bundles something called ‘Eucalyptus’, an open source tool for generating private clouds that can dynamically connect to Amazon EC2. Eucalyptus, an acronym for ‘Elastic Utility Computing Architecture Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems’, originated as an ambitious project run by the Computer Science Department at the University of California. But it quickly became apparent that the technology it was developing was in great demand, and professor Rich Wolski, as well as many of his students took sabbatical leave from their day jobs and founded Eucalyptus. So far, they haven’t gone back.

STEP 1: Getting Started

Before trying Eucalyptus for yourself, there are some demanding requirements. Installation is relatively straightforward, but you will need to use the Linux command line, and possibly, troubleshoot any problems by reading the log files.

You will need at least two machines. One for front-end management and another to act as a single nodes on the cluster. Clouds like these rely on virtualisation to provide the elasticity and software scaleability of the hardware doing the processing. They run virtualised instances, called images, of your chosen operating system. In the case of Eucalyptus, virtualisation is handled by either KVM or Xen at the kernel level, which is why you need a VT-enabled CPU for the node machines, along with plenty of horsepower, memory and storage. It also means that you will need to configure your cloud to do something useful after you’ve got it working, just as you would a standard Ubuntu server installation.

You’ll be given the option of installing a new cluster or adding a node to an existing one.

The machine used to control and manage your cloud is usually referred to as the backend, and to get started you need to insert the Ubuntu 9.10 Server into its drive and reboot. When you see the boot menu, select a language followed by ‘Install Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud’. Choose language, location and keyboard layout, then enter a host name, we used ubuntu1. The next step will ask whether you want to create a ‘Cluster’ or a ‘Node’, and you need to select the first option, ‘Cluster’.

You will then need to work through the standard Ubuntu partition options. Ideally, use the entire disk for the installation unless you need to keep data on the machine, and leave the most options at their default values. The installer will then go off and create the partitions it needs then download and install a few packages. After this, it will ask for the default username and password for the machine, and whether you need your home directory encrypting. Skip the HTTP proxy question and leave the automatic updates off for now, and set Postfix to ‘No Configuration’.

STEP 2: Network and Nodes

We now have a couple of questions that deal specifically with the Eucalyptus configuration. The first asks for a cluster name, and you can call it what you like. This is the name people will see if they access your cloud. The second question asks for a range of IP addresses on your LAN that Eucalyptus can safely use to assign to each node. To answer this, you need to know the range of addresses that your router is using.

Many routers on a home network, for example, will issue IP addresses in the range of 192.168.1.2 – 192.168.1.100, or similar. You need to find this information from your router and enter a range that isn’t going to be assigned automatically from the router but is on the same domain. ‘192.168.1.100-192.168.1.200’ would work with our previous example. But for the sake of our experiment, you only need to find a couple of spare addresses on the same domain.

It’s best to assign a range of currently-free IP addresses to make up your cluster. It saves a lot of hassle later on.

After entering these details, the remainder of the packages will be installed and you’ll be asked to reboot the machine without the disc in the drive. When the backend reboots, login to your account. You should see the IP address for the server displayed and the message about documentation, and you need to make sure this address in within your network’s range.

It’s now time to tackle the node. Take the same disc you used for the backend and use it to boot your node machine. Choose ‘Install Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud’ from the boot menu again, and go through the first few questions. After entering a new hostname, you should be told that there’s already a Eucalyptus cluster controller on your network, and ‘Node’ will be selected automatically. Just press return. Installation will now be identical to the earlier install, only without any further Eucalyptus questions. Even your user name and password are grabbed from the backend machine, and at the end of the process, you can reboot and the node is now running.

STEP 3: Configuration

On each machine, you should login and type ‘apt-get upgrade’ to download and install the latest package updates for the system. You’ll probably have to reboot each machine again.

We now need to tell the backend about the existence of our single node. Login to the backend machine, and type ‘sudo euca_conf –no-rsync –discover-nodes’. You should see something like the following:

New node found on 192.168.1.62; add it? [Yn]

Just press return, and you should see that the two machines connect and synchronise a pair of keys that will be used to authenticate future connections. Now launch a browser from any other machine on the LAN and go to ‘https://backend_ip:8443’. You will get a security warning about the unverified nature of the certificate used for the connection, but you’ll need to add an exception for this site. Firefox will step you through this process automatically.

You should run the configuration tool as a super user.

You will then see the ‘Eucalyptus Enterprise Cloud’ login screen. Enter ‘admin’ for username and the password, and you’ll be immediately asked to enter a new administrator password, and check the IP address of the server so that a new certificate can be generated. After clicking submit, you’ll find yourself at the Eucalyptus management console, but before we can get stuck into the details, we need to download something called a credentials file, that we can use to authenticate our own tinkering with the server, as well as any other cloud service you may want to use to expand your installed.

STEP 4: Credentials

Click on the Credentials tab followed by the ‘Download Credentials’ button. This will leave you with a zip file that you will need to transfer to your user account on the backend machine. The easiest way is from the command line, using ‘sftp backend_ip’ to connect to the machine, followed by the command ‘put’ with by the path to the zip file, ‘put euca2-admin-x509.zip’ for instance. On the backend, you then need to unzip the file into a hidden folder in your home directory with ‘unzip -d ~/.euca euca2-admin-x509.zip’ and run the script it contains that configures various environmental variables and keys for managing the cloud, ‘. ~/.euca/eucarc’. This script will need to be run whenever you re-connect to your backend system.

Once it’s properly installed, Eucalyptus’ web interface looks after much of the heavy lifting.

To check that everything is working as it should be, type ‘euca-describe-availability-zones verbose’. The output should look like the following:

AVAILABILITYZONE pcp_cloud 192.168.1.48
AVAILABILITYZONE |- vm types free / max cpu ram disk
AVAILABILITYZONE |- m1.small 0002 / 0002 1 128 2
AVAILABILITYZONE |- c1.medium 0002 / 0002 1 256 5

This is important information. The critical data is beneath the free/max columns. This shows the CPU cores available on your cloud for immediate use. The more nodes you have on the network, the higher the number here. If you see only zeros, then there has been a problem with the node starting the appropriate controller, and you’ll need to check its /var/log/eucalyptus’ directory for the log files.

STEP 5: Run an image

It’s now time to create a virtual instance of a machine to run on our node. Eucalyptus makes this very easy because it allows you to download pre-built packages.

Go back to the browser and click on the ‘Store’ tab in the management console and choose a pre-built image to download. We opted for Karmic Koala (i386), which is a 174MB download. You will also have to wait a couple of minutes for the image to be installed after the download has completed, but before long you should see the message ‘How to run?’, and you’re ready to go. We did have problems with our backend machine hanging at this point, but we added more memory to the system and it worked though a hitch.

You’re provided with a selection of pre-configured virtual machines just begging to be run on your new cloud.

Before we go back to the command line, click on the ‘How to run’ link next to the download, and make a note of the ‘emi’ value at the end of the command. This is the unique identifier for the image, and we’ll need to use this when we run it. Back on the command line, type ‘touch ~/.euca/mykey.priv; chmod 0600 ~/.euca/mykey.priv; euca-add-keypair mykey > ~/.euca/mykey.priv’ to create a key pair to authenticate the connection to your running image. Then type ‘euca-describe-groups’ followed by ‘euca-authorize default -P tcp -p 22 -s 0.0.0.0/0’ to enable SSH access to the virtualised machine, and finally, type the following to launch it:

euca-run-instances -k mykey -t c1.medium emi

Replace the emi value with the identifier you took from the web interface. You should also notice that we’ve specified ‘c1.medium’ as the type of image, and this is a preset for the amount of resources the image is given. These can be viewed and modified using the Configuration page of the web management interface. It may take a while to initialise as there’s a lot of data being copied across the network, but you can check it’s status with the ‘euca-describe-instances’ command, and wait for it’s state to switch to ‘running’ rather than ‘pending’. On our hardware, this took about 20 minutes.

You’ll also see the IP address of the new instance, and you can now connect to your new cloud server by typing ‘ssh -i ~/.euca/mykey.priv ubuntu@ip_address’. You’re now ready to install and run your mind-blowing web 2.0 application!

See also: Amazon EC2

Private clouds, of the kind we’ve started to build above, are an excellent raw resource if you need a dynamic pool of processing power. But the beauty of cloud computing is that it’s designed to be elastic, and this means you needn’t be restricted by the physical limitations of your own setup. With Eucalyptus, for example, you can take exactly the same images you’re running on your local machines, and move them to Amazon’s EC2 service as and when you need the extra horsepower.

This gives you relatively unlimited resources in terms of processing power, storage and network bandwidth, and you only have to pay for what you need, rather than the old model of paying for a rack of servers somewhere that spend most of their time idle. Eucalyptus manages this by building an API that’s compatible with Amazon’s, making the images that you configure on your local network drop-in compatible with the images that run on Amazon’s servers. Also, the tools that you use to manage and maintain your private cloud are the same you use to manage an Amazon-hosted cloud, making the transition between the two almost seamless.

There are other advantages to this compatibility too. You can create, test and experiment with private clouds before committing your concept to the costs and scrutiny of a public cloud running on Amazon’s servers. And private clouds, such as the one we create in the main text, can give you an excellent feel for how the technology works, and how you and your company may find it useful.

Troubleshooting

As you might have noticed, despite the Ubuntu installation being the easiest way of getting a usable cloud system, it’s still far from easy. There are a lot of aspect to the configuration that can go wrong, from the hardware that you choose, to the network that the various machines are communicating across. Another problem is that the Eucalyptus project is only in its infancy, with Ubuntu 9.10 being the first distribution to include packages by default. This means there isn’t a great deal of support, especially if you’re new to the world of clouds.

But there are several things you can do to help solve problems yourself. Firstly, you should run ‘euca-describe-availability-zones verbose’ to check whether your node machine has been detected and added to the cloud. If you have zero resources available, then it hasn’t. The most common cause for this problem is that the synchronisation of the keys from the backend to the node has failed, stopping the node from registering itself. Check ‘/var/lib/eucalyptus/keys’ on both machines to make sure the keys are available. If the keys on the backend are missing, trying running ‘/etc/init.d/eucalyptus-cc-registration restart’ to regenerate the keys, then then try to add the node again using ‘euca_conf –no-rsync –discover-nodes’. If all else fails, try ‘sudo /etc/init.d/eucalyptus-sc-registration restart’ too.

We also had problems trying to register nodes after updating the system with new packages. The solution to this problem is to either add nodes to the cluster before you update any packages, or leave your installation with the packages include with the default install. This shouldn’t matter for an experimental installation. Finally, if all else fails, trawl through files within the /var/log/eucalyptus directory on both machines, as this should give you some idea of where your setup may be failing.