Bad job hiding the (obvious) vendor ;)
I'm riding the bus back home to Boston after a cluster building gig
and your experience exactly matches what I encountered when I walked
into the datacenter to start work on a pile of dell 1950 servers.
I'll do you one better - 4 nodes out of our "homogenous" cluster had
reversed drive cabling which broke our imaging system as we had
specific data to place on 2 drives of differing capacity.
Regards,
Chris
/* Sent via phone - apologies for typos & terseness */
On Jun 6, 2008, at 11:39 AM, Gerry Creager <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
We recently purchased a set of hardware for a cluster from a
hardware vendor. We've encountered a couple of interesting issues
with bringing the thing up that I'd like to get group comments on.
Note that the RFP and negotiations specified this system was for a
cluster installation, so there would be no misunderstanding...
1. We specified "No OS" in the purchase so that we could install
CentOS as our base. We got a set of systems with a stub OS, and an
EULA for the diagnostics embedded on the disk. After clicking thru
the EULA, it tells us we have no OS on the disk, but does not fail
to PXE.
2. BIOS had a couple of interesting defaults, including warn on
keyboard error (Keyboard? Not intentionally. This is a compute
node, and should never require a keyboard. Ever.) We also find the
BIOS is set to boot from hard disk THEN PXE. But due to item 1,
above, we never can fail over to PXE unless we load up a keyboard
and monitor, and hit F12 to drop to PXE.
In discussions with our sales rep, I'm told that we'd have had to
pay extra to get a real bare hard disk, and that, for a fee, they'd
have been willing to custom-configure the BIOS. OK, with the BIOS
this isn't too unreasonable: They have a standard BIOS for all
systems and if you want something special, paying for it's the
norm... But, still, this is a CLUSTER installation we were quoted,
not a desktop.
Also, I'm now told that "almost every customer" ordered their
cluster configuration service at several kilobucks per rack. Since
the team I'm working with has some degree of experience in
configuring and installing hardware and software on computational
clusters, now measured in at least 10 separate cluster
installations, this seemed like an unnecessary expense. However,
we're finding vendor gotchas that are annoying at the least, and
sometimes cause significant work-around time/effort.
Finally, our sales guy yesterday was somewhat baffled as to why we'd
ordered without OS, and further why we were using Linux over Windows
for HPC. Not trying to revive the recent rant-fest about Windows
HPC capabilities, can anyone cite real HPC applications generally
run on significant clusters (I'll accept Cornell's work, although I
remain personally convinced that the bulk of their Windows HPC work
has been dedicated to maintaining grant funding rather than doing
real work)?
No, I won't identify the vendor.
--
Gerry Creager -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Texas Mesonet -- AATLT, Texas A&M University
Cell: 979.229.5301 Office: 979.862.3982 FAX: 979.862.3983
Office: 1700 Research Parkway Ste 160, TAMU, College Station, TX 77843
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