Thread:Project:Support desk/Class paper/reply (5)

You people are awesome.

Here are my hardware questions. I’m going to focus on my home system as an example of minimal hardware, but I need to mention the Wikimedia Foundation server farm as an example of MediaWiki’s ability to scale.

I’ve found the WMFLabs Ganglia site. I believe that the grid is a Beowulf cluster of commodity hardware running Linux with the Open Grid Engine for job control. The typical box seems to run at 2.66 GHz with two GB of ram and various sizes of hard drive. True or false?

http://ganglia.wmflabs.org/latest/?r=month&cs=&ce=&tab=m&vn=

Is this the WMF production cluster or the WMFLabs virtual cluster or is it both?

Does the grid run under OpenMPI or something else?

The four largest clusters by CPU count and my guesses as to their purpose are listed below.

Deployment-prep – 69 (page server?) Tools – 67 (MediaWiki, etc. development?) Visualeditor – 66 (visual editor development, testing, etc?) Analytics – 31 (http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/ ?)

What percentage of the 691 CPUs (or which clusters or nodes) actually directly support Wikipedia’s page serving function?

Are there any other “WOW!” statistics?

Are there any “scholarly sources” which talk specifically about the WMFLabs grid? I’m trying to avoid using wiki hosted sites, which makes this whole exercise especially interesting.

I have already found the Matthew L. Massie paper on the Ganglia system itself and the Ward Cunningham WikiWikiWeb site.

Thanks, Ralph