Re: First Beowulf cluster. Some pointers?
> 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...
Just remember that if you're running NFS for the root (diskless), you
either need a memory galore to dump it in on the nodes, or else separeate
copies of the OS for each client on the masternode.... The only things we
export via nfs (from the master) are /home, /usr/local, and /usr/shared
> 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?
MPI isn't difficult. It's a lot like pthreads. I'm not sure of any FAQ's
or HOWTO's. Where I work bought me some books on it and I read those.
> In theory (I'm reasonably good at perl/C/C++), could bash/gcc be
> modified to use MPI?
In theory, yes. In practice? Not really, as far as I can tell. You have to
realize that not everything can/should be paralellized, and not everything
can/will gain from being paralellized.
Although I qualify that... I could be thinking you're wanting to do
something different. GCC paralellized... do you mean the compile itself
occurs in parallel across the nodes? Or it compiles a program to
automagically use MPI?
~Warren
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