Network Security Blog

Now this is ‘hacking’ in the sense of making technology work for you! Last week Eric Bermender from Industrial Light and Magic gave a presentation on how ILM uses a single image on their file servers to boot over a thousand servers for use in their rendering cluster. The systems have no real file system on the hard drives, instead they boot via pxe, copy the files that have to be writable to a RAM disk and use the hard drives as swap space. Eric says there was a long, iterative process of ‘boot, pray, fix the problems, repeat’, but that once they got everything working, it’s been worth the effort.

I believe this may be the future of computing in a lot of areas where you need a lot of computing power. Apparently, under the old ILM system, each server had to be individually built, patching was a nightmare and troubleshooting even worse. Now, if they have a software problem, it’s very apparent since it’ll affect the whole cluster, and hardware problems are obvious since they only affect one system. If they need to patch the systems, they only need to update the base image and every system in the cluster automatically picks up on the patch. Pretty slick stuff.