Nanyang Technological University in Top500 and Green500 List

Nanyang Technological University supercomputer cluster has broke into the the top500list and green500 list. At point of writing the NTU Cluster is

1. 267th in the Top500 List with over 28 Teraflops
2. 24th most energy efficient with 266.68 Mflops per watts
3. Fastest in ASEAN (in term of Rmax)
4. Deployed the latest iDataplex, DCS9900, GPFS, Voltaire QDR infiniband

Happy for the NTU HPC team in Singapore. First time we are in top 500 for an island state.

News Articles:

1. NTU Unveils Green Supercomputer, Fastest in ASEAN
   NTU unveils green and fastest supercomputer in ASEAN

Return Code Error of 127 for Nagios

If launching the nagios web interface, you encountered error like "Return code of 127 for check of service 'HTTP' on host 'localhost' was out of bounds. Make sure the plugin you're trying to run actually exists."

From the error itself, your installation of nagios-plugins has issues. To resolve the problems, make sure you install

# yum install nagios-plugins-all
(You should see 55+ plugin packages being installed)

For other readings on Nagios, see

1. How to resolve unpingable host down status in Nagios
2. Notes to remembers when Installing Nagios 3.x on CentOS 5
3. Using Nagios 2.x/3.x on CentOS

How to resolve unpingable host down status in Nagios

After installing nagios, you may face some issues

Some hosts are not able to be ping due to firewall. By default, Nagios use the check_host_alive by default at /etc/nagios/objects/template.cfg. check_host_alive uses ping to check whether the host is alive. So your nagios web admin will see a host down status.

To use another commands to replace the check_host_alive with check_http which is more useful as a "check-alive-status", change it at the /etc/nagios/objects/hosts.cfg file. This will override the default at /etc/nagios/objects/templates.cfg

We assume that check_http is already define in the /etc/nagios/objects/command.cfg

define host{
use windows-server
host_name xxxx
alias xxxx web server
check_command check_http
address xxx.com.sg
contact_groups admin
}

Notes to remembers when Installing Nagios 3.x on CentOS 5

This is a follow-up of the article of Using Nagios 2.x & 3.x on CentOS 5. If you follow closely you should get it up and running.

Some Issues to note during configuration


Note 1: First install EPEL. You can follow the following Blog Entry Red Hat Enterprise Linux / CentOS Linux Enable EPEL Repository


Note 2: Yum install nagios and all the plugins # yum install nagios, nagios-plugins-all, nagios-nrpe
(You will see not only nagios 3.x installing but also 55+ plugins too)


Note 3: Configure Objects Configuration File
(Make sure you include all the configuration file you are using to be listed)

OBJECT CONFIGURATION FILE(S)
cfg_file=/etc/nagios/contactgroups.cfg
cfg_file=/etc/nagios/contacts.cfg
cfg_file=/etc/nagios/hostgroups.cfg
cfg_file=/etc/nagios/hosts.cfg
cfg_file=/etc/nagios/services.cfg
cfg_file=/etc/nagios/timeperiods.cfg


Note 4: Make hosts.cfg file and fill up the information
define host{
use windows-server
host_name xxxx
alias xxx Web Server
check_command check_http
address www.xxx.com.sg
contact_groups admins
}



Note 5: Make the hostgroups.cfg and fill up the information
define hostgroup{
hostgroup_name windows-servers
alias Windows Servers
members xxxxx
}


Note 6: Define services.cfg to command.cfg and hostgroup.cfg
(Look at http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Nagios for more information)
Remember to list the services you wish to implement for nagios. It will interact with command.cfg, hostgroups.cfg to enable the service. Thus command.cfg and hostgroups.cfg must be properly written

define service{
use generic-service
service_description HTTP
notification_options n
check_command check_http
contact_groups admins
hostgroup_name windows-servers,linux-servers
}


Note 7: Test the nagios configuration before updating the services
# cd /etc/nagios/nagios -v nagios.cfg

EnFuzion3D 2009 enabling 3D Application in EC2 Cloud

EnFuzion® is the first commercial product on the market today to enable seamless rendering with major 3D applications in the Amazon® EC2 Cloud.

According to EnFuzion, it can supports major applications including Autodesk products, Adobe products vRay etc.

For more information read "EnFuzion3D 2009 Enables Resizable Image Rendering in the Amazon Cloud"

Cloud is In!