Re: Compute Farm
On Tue, 10 Feb 1998, Tim Sailer wrote:
> The powers-that-be around here have almost decided to scrap Slowaris x86
> for the 200 machine PPro compouter farm, and go with Linux... I need to
> convince them to use Debian and not RH. They want to be able to
> configure 1 machine and mirror the setup to each machine in the farm,
> without having to go to each of the remaining 199 and configure it by
> hand. Someone told them that RH made this easy, and no other dist could
> do it!
Other people have given some excellent advice already. I may be doing
something like this in the near future, in a much smaller scale (20+2 node
farm aiming at 4+ Gflop/s).
Reading the documentation, bootp seems like a good option for network
configuration detailts, but, as Craig Sanders pointed out, not a very
dependable one. In a more "fixed" situation, it seems better to
statically configure the machines using smart scripts...
I don't know if this is what you are up to, but you may want to check out
Beowulf's home page (shows up in Yahoo! rather easily). It's RH based, but
I don't see anything there that's Red Hat specific. There are a couple of
kernel patches and and bunch of rpm's. I recall there's PVM and MPP. Drake
Diedrich has already packaged PVM and dqs. If I ever get the time, I'd
like to try to make a Debian version of the requiered packages.
Marcelo
PS: What I'm still pondering is exactly how RH "does this easy". Last time
I poked at RH, it didn't had anything to automate this kind of task.
PPS: Since neither RH nor Debian actually have anything built-in for this
task, Debian is still a better choice: several times ppl in the
developer's list have expressed interest in further developing Deity into
this direction. I know this doesn't buy you anything right now, but it may
be worth mentioning.
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