HPC-Europa2 Virtual Cluster liveDVD – milestone6 (final release)

The JRA2 team is proud to announce the release of HPC-Europa2 live DVD milestone 6. You can download milestone 6 ISO image (compressed with size 1.7 GB) from the below links:

CINECA (Italy) – http://www.hpc-europa.eu/?q=node/142
EPCC (Scotland) – http://hpce2jra2.epcc.ed.ac.uk/milestone6.iso.gz
HLRS (Germany) – https://fs.hlrs.de/projects/live-ptd/iso/milestone6.iso.gz

Release Note for Milestone 6
============================
The Virtual Cluster liveDVD:
* provides tools and libraries that are installed and used at the partner sites.
* emaulates the environment of the platforms available at HPC-Europa centers.
* allows hands-on building of a virtual cluster.

The liveDVD contains training and dissemination material published by the
HPC-Europa2 project, including material from the partner centers such as slides,
video tutorials and example code. Optional access to a source code repository enables
the migration of code and data from the Virtual Cluster to the user account created
on the HPC-Europa machines.

The liveDVD is based on SliTaz GNU/Linux, a free operating system, working completely
in RAM and booting from a removable media. The file size of the SliTaz GNU/Linux
3.0 ISO image is 29 MB. Hence, it leaves plenty of space for adding tools, libraries
and training material into this liveDVD. The SliTaz system is quick, responsive, and clean.
A lightweight and elegant desktop is included as well in the 29MB ISO image.

The milestone 6 ISO image has roughly the size of 3.8 GB including several tools
and libraries, as well as training material. Moreover, it contains a documentation
of how to build a virtual cluster using VirtualBox, and HPC-Europa2's Science and
Supercomputing in Europe research highlights for 2009 and 2010. Finally, this milestone
release addresses several bug fixes, such as firefox with flash support and
build scripts for Torque.

Since the previous release (milestone 5), existing packages have been updated, such as:
* MPICH2 to version 1.4.1p1
* Firefox to version 9.0.1 with flash support.
* Paraver to support the updated version of MPICH2.

In addition, this release has added several new packages:
* lava-1.0.6: Platform Lava - an open source version of Platform Load Sharing Facility (LSF).
* info (texinfo-4.13a) and man pages (man-db-2.6.0.2 and man-pages-3.35) for Linux documentation.
* Abiword and Gnumeric for office word documents and spreadsheets.
* Compiler wrappers (based on gcc and gfortran) to emulate Intel, IBM and NEC SX compilers.

You can download milestone 6 ISO image (compressed - size 1.7 GB) from the below link:
    http://www.hpc-europa.eu/?q=node/142

System Requirements
===================
* A laptop or computing with a DVD drive.
* Intel or AMD processor with a hardware virtualization support when using KVM
  and libvirt. Otherwise, this liveDVD can be run under VirtualBox or VMware or similar.

Known Issues
============
* PGI compilers require a license file in order to work (not included in this milestone).
* Totalview requires a license file in order to work (not included in this milestone).
  For requiring a demo license visit:
  http://www.roguewave.com/products/totalview-family/totalview.aspx
* On a MacBook Pro laptop, the mousepad does not work. Need to use an USB mouse
* Resizing video screen on VLC causes an unexpected exit of the program.
* VLC has no sound for viewing mkv videos.
* VLC cannot stream files or view incoming streams.

Acknowledgement
===============
This work was carried out under the HPC-EUROPA2 project (project number: 228398),
with the support of the European Community - Research Infrastructure Action of the FP7.
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