Carsten Aulbert

Fediverse Profile link: https://social.linux.pizza/@realmurphy

1980-1993 School
1993-1994 civil services
1994-2000 Technische Universität Braunschweig, diploma in physics (and a bit of math in parallel)
2000-2007 PhD candidate/postdoc at Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam
since 2007 staff at Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Hannover with the "Atlas cluster" being the main working area

Accepted Talks:

Debian GNU/Linux at large scale locally - automating a local HTC cluster

At the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) we are running a largish computing facility called “Atlas”.

In this talk I want to briefly show how we scaled up from earlier iterations with 10 computers installed manually, to the current 3,500 server set-up with Debian GNU/Linux as our foundation and not much personnel.

I will try to at least touch the basics of operation like automatic installation and configuration with FAI/salt, getting work done with HTCondor, monitoring, daily tasks and chores, and how educating users usually pays off in the long run.

Ideally, anyone with some Linux background should be able to understand all of it as I do not plan to dive into details too much.