Good day to the group. I would like to make a brief introduction to myself and raise my first question to the forum.
My name is Steve Herborn and I am a new employee at the United States Naval Academy in the Advanced Research Computing group which supports the IT systems used for faculty research. Part of my responsibilities will be the care & feeding of our Beowulf Cluster which is a commercially procured Cluster from Aspen Systems. It purchased & installed about four or five years ago. As delivered the system was originally configured with two Head nodes each with 32 compute nodes. One head node was running SUSE 9.x and the other Head Node was running Scyld (version unknown) also with 32 compute nodes. While I don't know all of the history, apparently this system was not very actively maintain and had numerous hardware & software issues, to include losing the array on which Scyld was installed. Prior to my arrival a decision was made to reconfigure the system from having two different head nodes running two different OS Distributions to one Head Node controlling all 64 Compute Nodes. In addition SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (10SP2) (X86-64) was selected as the OS for all of the nodes. Now on to my question which will more then likely be the first of many. In the collective group wisdom what would be the most efficient & effective way to "push" the SLES OS out to all of the compute nodes once it is fully installed & configured on the Head Node. In my research I've read about various Cluster packages/distributions that have that capability built in, such as ROCKS & OSCAR which appear to have the innate capability to do this as well as some additional tools that would be very nice to use in managing the system. However, from my current research in appears that they do not support SLES 10sp2 for the AMD 64-bit Architecture (although since I am so new at this I could be wrong). Are there any other "free" (money is always an issue) products or methodologies I should be looking at to push the OS out & help me manage the system? It appears that a commercial product Moab Cluster Builder will do everything I need & more, but I do not have the funds to purchase a solution. I also certainly do not want to perform a manual OS install on all 64 Compute Nodes. Thanks in advance for any & all help, advice, guidance, or pearls of wisdom that you can provide this Neophyte. Oh and please don't ask why SLES 10sp2, I've already been through that one with management. It is what I have been provided & will make work. Steven A. Herborn U.S. Naval Academy Advanced Research Computing 410-293-6480 (Desk) 757-418-0505 (Cell)
_______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
