Steve Herborn wrote:
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
Greetings Steve
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
Ouch ... if you call the good folks at Aspen, they could help with that
(ping me if you need a contact)
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.
Ok.
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 &
Danger Will Robinson ... for the N people who answer, you are likely to
get N+2 answers, and N/2 arguments going ... not a bad thing, but to
steal from the Perl motto "there is more than one way to do these things
..."
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
First: Stateless (e.g. diskless) versus Stateful (e.g. local
installation). Scyld is "stateless" though Don will likely correct me
(as this is massively oversimpilfied). SuSE can be installed Stateless
or Stateful. Its installation can be automated ... we have been doing
this for years (one of the few vendors to have done this with SuSE). It
can also be run diskless ... we have booted compute nodes with
Infiniband to fully operational compute nodes visible in all aspects
within the cluster in under 60 seconds. This is the case for 9.3, 10.x
SuSE flavors.
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
Rocks only supports Redhat and rebuilds, I wouldn't recommend it for the
task as you have indicated.
Oscar might be able to handle this, though I haven't kept up on it, so I
am not sure how active it is.
You want to look at xCat v2 (open source), and Warewulf/Perceus (open
source). Our package (Tiburon) is not ready to be released, and we will
likely make it a meta package atop Perceus at some point soon. Though
it is used in production at several large commercial companies
specifically for SuSE clusters.
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
See above. If you want a prepackaged system, likely you are going to
need to spend money. Moab is a possibility, though for SuSE, I would
recommend looking at Concurrent Thinking's appliance. It will cost
money, but they solve pretty much all of the problems for you.
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.
No... in all likelihood, you really don't want to do any installation to
the nodes (stateless if possible).
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.
It's not an issue, though we recommend better kernels/kernel updates.
Compared to the RHEL kernels, it uses modern stuff.
Joe
** Steven A. Herborn **
* * U.S. * * ** Naval Academy **
** Advanced Research Computing **
** 410-293-6480 (Desk) **
** 757-418-0505 (Cell) **** **
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