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Re: First Beowulf cluster. Some pointers?



>>>>> "stramiello" == stramiello  <stramiello@whiterabbit.resnet.gatech.edu> writes:

    >> What I was thinking (correct me if I'm thinking wrong here) is
    >> to have all the disks (only 4*105Mb) in one machine. This
    >> machine will have a a gfx card (Don't know which type, it's
    >> colour anyway), 32Mb ram (or more, if the 'clients' is fine
    >> with only 16Mb)...

    stramiello> I think you're going to need a larger hdd than
    stramiello> that. To have an NFS-root diskless cluster, you really
    stramiello> need separate copies of the OS storied on the master
    stramiello> node for each of the slave nodes.

I was thinking of making a minimal installation (I managed to have
a installation of ~ 40Mb on a firewall system I made a while ago) on
the master node, and then export /usr and /tmp. What exactly to do
with /var I'm not quite sure of yet, but parts of it could be NFS'ed
I suppose...

I've been doing some diskless system setup a couple of years ago, so this
is no big problem. This was on the x86 platform, but 'theory-of-functionality'
is the same I guess :).

Doing software raid (linear) on the three 'leftover' disks, I could fit
most of what I want on those...

    >> If I remember correctly from my last potato installation (on a
    >> i386 system), there was some 'cluster system' options... What
    >> exactly should I install on this?

    stramiello> On the master, you need dhcpd/tftpboot/nfs set up,
    stramiello> with MPI master package.

    stramiello> On the clients, you need the MPI client packages.

Thanx.
*taking notes*
 
    stramiello> Not everything can be clustered... it has to be
    stramiello> specifically written in MPI to run across the nodes.

Darn. And how 'difficult' is this? What -dev packages do I need for
this? Any FAQ/HOWTO's about this?


In theory (I'm reasonably good at perl/C/C++), could bash/gcc be
modified to use MPI?


A friend of mine said to try to use something called MOSIX (I've seen
some reference to that here), but what exactly is that?

'True clustering system' was what my friend refered it to be... ?

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