Hi, Im new to the list & also to cluster technology in general. Im planning on building a small 20+node cluster, and I have some basic questions. We're planning on running 5-6 motherboards with quad-core amd 3.0GHz phenoms, and 4GB of RAM per node. Off the bat, does this sound like a reasonable setup
My first question is about node file&operating systems: I'd like to go with a diskless setup, preferably using an NFS root for each node. However, based on some of the testing Ive done, running the nodes off of the NFS share(s) has turned out to be rather slow & quirky. Our master node will be running on a completely different hardware setup than the slaves, so I *believe* it will make it more complicated & tedious to setup&update the nfsroots for all of the nodes (since its not simply a matter of 'cloning' the master's setup&config). Is there any truth to this, am I way off? Can anyone provide any general advice or feedback on how to best setup a diskless node? The alternative that I was considering was using (4GB?) USB flash drives to drive a full-blown,local OS install on each node... Q: does anyone have experience running a node off of a usb flash drive? If so, what are some of the pros/cons/issues associated with this type of setup? My next question(s) is regarding network setup. Each motherboard has an integrated gigabit nic. Q: should we be running 2 gigabit NICs per motherboard instead of one? Is there a 'rule-of-thumb' when it comes to sizing the network requirements? (i.e.,'one NIC per 1-2 processor cores'...) Also, we were planning on plugging EVERYTHING into one big (unmanaged) gigabit switch. However, I read somewhere on the net where another cluster was physically separating NFS & MPI traffic on two separate gigabit switches. Any thoughts as to whether we should implement two switches, or should we be ok with only 1 switch? Notes: The application we'll be running is NOAA's wavewatch3, in case anyone has any experience with it. It will utilize a fair amount of NFS traffic (each node must read a common set of data at periodic intervals), and I *believe* that the MPI traffic is not extremely heavy or constant (i.e., nodes do large amounts of independent processing before sending results back to master). Id appreciate any help or feedback anyone would be willing&able to offer... Thanks, P.Romero _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
