Running JtR on our Parallella Beowulf Cluster
In the previous post, we created a Beowulf cluster using N Parallella boards. If you are using my images, the files you need to run the John the Ripper application should already be on them. If you don’t (or if they aren’t), follow this tutorial to set up the files on your cluster and get going. I’ll also walk you through how the code works. I wrote this demo for my parallel computing class, and presented it at the “Budget Beowulfs” special session at SIGCSE 2015. If you use these files, I ask that you please cite the following: Adams... read more
15 Jun 2015 | parallella, cluster, epiphanyCreating a Parallella Cluster
The goal of this tutorial is to create a simple Beowulf cluster using Parallella boards. After completing these instructions, you should have a simple Parallella Cluster with N nodes. In the examples that follow, N=4. However, the tutorial can be used to create clusters of any size N. These instructions are adapted from the raspberry pi cluster instructions provided by Dr. Simon Cox from the University of Southampton. Unlike those instructions, I designed this tutorial to enable students to assemble a working parallella cluster within one hour. This page is based off of the original cluster tutorial I wrote in... read more
15 Jun 2015 | parallella, cluster, setupThe Dot Product Program Revisited
Did you try and fix the Dot Product program from the last post? How successful were you? As you get used to Epiphany programs, it will get easier to debug and write your own. For now, it’s best that whenever you write your own programs, you always start from an existing Epiphany program and slowly make changes. Recall that we want to calculate the sum of products of two vectors containing the elements between 0..N-1, for some value of N (Assume N is a power of 2, and N >= 16. To do this, we make the following observations: The... read more
10 Jun 2015 | parallella, epiphanyThe Dot Product Program
Now that we have covered a basic Epiphany program, we will go on to a more complex example that executes in Parallel. This program can be found in the epiphany-examples/apps/dotproduct/ directory on your Parallella board. Before we start discussing the code, let’s discuss the problem. Calculating Dot Product in Parallel The dot product between two arrays is the sum of the products. Consider the arrays A=[1,2,3] and B=[4,5,6]. The dot product of these two arrays is 1x4 + 2x5 + 3x6 = 4+10+18 = 32. A C implementation of this example follows: int main(){ int a[3] = {1,2,3}; int b[3]... read more
09 Jun 2015 | parallella, epiphanyHello Epiphany
In this post, I’m going to walk you through Epiphany’s hello world program, which can be found in the epiphany-examples/apps/hello-world directory. I strongly encourage you to see my previous post about the Epiphany architecture to assist you with your understanding of the material in this post. I will assume you understand Epiphany’s basic memory model and architecture. This post was adapted from my slides and lecture notes that I used to teach my students during the Epiphany unit we had this past semester. This post summarizes the second lesson in the unit. Epiphany programming model Yes, the Parallella people did... read more
03 Jun 2015 | parallella, epiphany