As my internship reaches to an end, I would like to thank Intel for hosting the dissertation for my master degree. During my stay here in Shannon, I found many new innovative directions that could be explored and I had the chance to extend/reveal my skills. Inspired from the field of computer security, with obvious influences from the area of cryptography, I discovered a personal paradise at Intel’s Lab.

In a nutshell, I built a multi-node diskless cluster that is controlled from a main board and it is able to schedule jobs in parallel. The interesting part comes from the fact that the entire approach is diskless and it shares only a single shared storage point, located at the main board. That in practice means that every processing on the nodes is done on the fly through the network and apparently the operating system is also loaded on the fly by using the Pre-Boot eXecution Environment (PXE) & Tftpboot.

The idea behind the cluster was to explore the processing that we could obtain for general hashing operations. There are many open source tools for High Performance Computing and I was more than glad to explore them. Intel Shannon, significantly contributed to the entire project, since it provided me with all the necessary hardware toys and a high-tech lab to setup my system. I would like to personally thank the following people: Benne de Weger, Padraic Garvey, Michael Hennessey, Pierre Laurent, Sergio Borghese and Joseph Gasparakis.

Document:    “A Diskless Cluster Architecture for Hashing Operations”
Presentation:     “A Diskless Cluster Architecture for Hashing Operations (Pres)”