MONTRÉAL (January 1, 2000) — Canadian IT services company Cyberlogic, founded in 1995 by Réjean Lajoie, gives Adelie Linux a new home on the World Wide Web amidst Y2K panic and strong investments in Internet technology companies. Cyberlogic has expertise in Gentoo system administration, high performance computing, and software development.
Note: Pay attention to ‘Adelie’ vs. ‘Adélie’ throughout this article; the former is historical, the latter is present-day. We’re traveling back in time exactly 25 years. Besides referring to the same penguin and sharing domain names over the years, these names are unrelated.
Adelie Linux is a Cyberlogic initiative led by Marc St-Pierre to enable distributed high performance computing on Gentoo systems as single-system image (SSI) clusters.
Because Gentoo Linux is a young, innovative, and very well designed distribution that give their users a great deal of flexibility, a clear upgrade path and a very high level of hardware optimization, which makes it especially attractive for all kind of high performance applications.
Adelie/SSI aims at making Gentoo Linux an obvious alternative for clusters and other distributed environment for real life, industrial applications.
More information can be found at the Frequently Asked Questions webpage.
Fast forward to 2003. The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter provides some more context.
Excerpt from Volume 2, Issue 25 (June 23, 2003):
The Adelie Linux Team is composed of analysts, interns, students and professors from various partners. The project is active in [L]inux-based technologies and development, including Single System Image technologies for use in clusters as well as other products and technologies.
Excerpt from Volume 2, Issue 33 (August 18, 2003):
[The] Gentoo Cluster Project certainly deserves more attention. […] The driving force behind it all is an initiative known as Adelie Linux, part of the University of Montreal’s Center for Research on Computation and its Applications (CERCA), an institute specializing in parallel and distributed multi-processor systems.
When CERCA’s High Performance Computing Group needed an environment for their own Beowulf systems, they chose Gentoo Linux […]. A local IT-solutions firm, Cyberlogic, joined CERCA in conducting the Single System Image project that is now fully operational, running on the university’s own and an external industrial Beowulf.
According to Cyberlogic, the Adelie/SSI cluster management system allows for a centralization of all operations on the server, providing a single point of control for the whole distributed environment, offering a performance increase of up to 30%, easier administration and expansion, fast bootup and enhanced robustness. Cyberlogic’s complete cluster solutions, based on Gentoo and Adelie, are available with processors ranging from Xeon and Pentium 4 to Athlon MP/XP, and – thanks to Olivier Crête’s AMD 64 port of Gentoo – even Opteron CPUs.
Excerpt from Volume 3, Issue 2 (January 12, 2004):
This week, we are featuring Olivier Crête (tester), a Montréal resident who is currently spending a year in Europe. Olivier is on the AMD64 project, maintains a few packages that would otherwise have been abandoned, and is working on some of the Adelie Linux clustering enhancements to Gentoo. …
… he was employed at Cyberlogic, a Montreal company providing computers and support services, including clustering. One of the projects he worked on there was Adelie Linux, using Gentoo as the foundation for clustering, including AMD Opteron-based clusters.
Cyberlogic was very supportive of their staff pursuing an AMD64 version of Gentoo, and Olivier worked with Daniel Robbins and others to start making it a reality. In particular, Olivier noted that Brad House, the current Gentoo AMD64 Project lead, “is doing a tremendous job and the AMD64 port would not be anywhere near where it is without his contribution.”
In a somewhat adorable twist, from a Cyberlogic news article posted June 26, 2003:
The Adelie Linux team is currently working on producing the first Gentoo LiveCD for the AMD64 architecture. With the help of Gentoo developers, it was possible to create “stage1”, “stage2” and “stage3” optimized for this new and promising 64-bit architecture.
Fast forward to 2025. Olivier Crête generously offers us a bit more historical context via an email exchange (which has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity):
Adelie was commercially led by Cyberlogic, a small PC assembler/store for whom one of their big customers was the Université de Montréal, and its engineering school, l’École Polytechnique de Montréal, where I studied software engineering. They had already extended the business beyond selling PCs to doing IT services for small business (maintaining Windows desktop, and Linux/Windows print/file sharing servers).
One of the professors at the École Polytechnique, Robert Roy, who was an expert in HPC, wanted to create a local Montréal based business sector around HPC which he saw as a future growth area. Marc was one of the partners of Cyberlogic, and together they decided to create a Linux platform based on Gentoo, but squarely aimed at compute clusters.
Most of the development was done by students like myself and my friend Jean-François Richard. The other person who worked on it from Cyberlogic was Benoit Morin, who’s main work was building customer business web apps for Cyberlogic’s customers.
From a technical point of view, it was a plain Gentoo distro compiled specifically for the target hardware. We saw a 1-2% performance gain in real workloads just from recompiling core libs like GLibc with the right flags.
The other big difference is that all the computers in the clusters, both the master and the slaves had exactly the same system image. At boot time, each machine would get its name and config type from the DHCP server, and would then run appropriate script to specialize itself.
We called that “Single System Image” (SSI).
It was an attempt to simplify the adminstration in the era before tools like Chef, Puppet were invented. And, we didn’t have containers yet, so we need to install the software on all the nodes to run it. If I remember correctly, we just used a NFS root to do it.
For me, the big thing that happened is that we had an AMD Opteron machine, which was the first amd64 CPU available for purchase. It was still very rare, so I was invited by Daniel Robbins, then Gentoo leader, to work with him on buliding the original amd64 port over that summer, and I became one of its maintainers for the first year.
It also helped launched my career, as my first job after graduation was working on a never released cluster filesystem.
Today, Adélie (with the accent) also traces its roots to Gentoo, but is neither related to Gentoo nor the Adelie (without the accent) project that came before it. The fact that Adélie is focused on high performance computing has nothing to do with the Adelie of yesteryear.
The–parallels–are entirely a serendipitous coincidence of which we had been previously unaware, but shows that HPC is in our DNA. Initially I found this document about setting up a Gentoo HPC cluster and was baffled by this statement and related configuration snippets:
This document was written by people at the Adelie Linux R&D Center <http://www.adelielinux.com> as a step-by-step guide to turn a Gentoo System into a High Performance Computing (HPC) system.
# Adelie Linux Research & Development Center
# /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost
192.168.1.100 master.adelie master
192.168.1.1 node01.adelie node01
192.168.1.2 node02.adelie node02These days, Adélie has the domains because Cyberlogic had dropped them years ago:
Cyberlogic shut its doors in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic but maintains the same telephone number as was previously listed on the Adelie website.
With love, and a Happy New Year to all,
~zv