[Nix-dev] Locking breaks distributed builds with a common /nix/store

[David Soergel]

On Apr 1, 2010, at 8:07 AM, Tony White wrote:

> Wow! Hats off to you sir! I mean, you've been able to build a hydra cluster?

I'm not using Hydra; just the "distributed builds" feature of regular Nix, with the twist that the nodes have a shared filesystem where the store lives.  Perhaps Hydra also works this way, but I know nothing about it.  I still trigger individual builds manually with nix-env and so forth.

> What kind of hardware are you using and how many machines are you running?

It's a research cluster at UC Berkeley.  So far I'm only using a small fraction of it, but in total there are about 268 nodes (8 cores, 24GB each) with Nehalem processors and Infiniband interconnect.

> I know you've only just got it to work but will you be able to post
> any statistics in the future, say for instance how long it takes to
> build the desktop CD? Just to see how much power you can draw out of
> it.

Unfortunately not... it's a shared resource so it wouldn't be appropriate for me to run this kind of benchmark.

> Are you writing a paper on it or is it just for fun?

I've repurposed Nix to manage data analysis workflows, in this case for bioinformatics computations.  I do plan to write up my whole infrastructure around that at some point, but first I have to finish my dissertation (biology, not CS) :)

-ds


_______________________________________________________
David Soergel                            (650) 303-5324
dev at davidsoergel.com        http://www.davidsoergel.com
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