Re: Bug#97336: ITP: dsh -- dancer's shell, or a distributed shell.
Hi Junichi,
On Monday 21 May 2001 17:15, Junichi Uekawa wrote:
> Do you mean, some architecture where a standard system-wide configuration
> file exists so that mpich and dsh can rip off the list of machines from one
> location?
>
> That would be good, and Debianlike.
Yeah, definitely :) Not just mpich and dsh, but any package that is a beowuf
program could use that. I have in mind a nice scripting environment not
unlike the menu system.
Athough a beowulf admin could certainly do all that by himself, some
convenience wouldn't hurt. We can also build cool administration utils on
top of that.
So, how would it look like? We should have an easy way of defining beowulf
configurations.
Some standard location for beowulf configuration would be the first step.
+ /etc/beowulf
|___ clusters -- names of clusters
|___ cluster1
|___ cluster2
Specifying the content of those configuration files would be an important
task :)
Then, some utility like `update-beowulf' could run package-specific filters.
We can also provide system tools in beowulf packages with wrappers that
automatically update their nodes list, etc. Inserting some fault tolerance
there wouldn't be difficult. We could also determine standard system services
such as logging, monitoring and testing for the beowulf clusters.
My idea is simply to store configuration in the beowulf "interface" node.
Next, we could define what a beowulf configuration is. What configuration and
programs beowulf "interface" and "compute" nodes will have. Those
configurations would be automated through some packages that oversee
tweaking of various parameters.
Now that fai is finally released we could also try to hook fai into all that.
Of course, debian-installer development is going on and we should see how
scriptable that is. We could certainly use a client/server version of
debian-installer to do "magic-floppy" or netboot installs. Installation is
a very important part of any beowulf setup. So are upgrades, configuration
changes etc. I remember how many times nodes have been re-installed
or scripts written just to change a small thing at our cluster.
Surely these are off the top of my head. :) Kind of a wishlist as a suffering
beowulf admin, and would be fun to implement.
Looking forward to your suggestions.
Thanks,
Reply to: