I stand by what Joe says. Good advice. When at Viglen XMA we had a similar system for field testing and burnin. However we did not use a USB bootable system. We would take a complete head node on site when I first joined the company, using Rocks Linux. I am no far of Rocks I'm afraid - sorry Rocks guys but it just got under my skin.
In later days we got some small form factor HP systems and I used an OpenHPC install on them. If you get a small form factor system with a PCI Express slot this can use a 10Gbps or an Infiniband card so you have the correct network to PXE over. So I would look at a portable small form factor system, using OpenHPC or the utilities with Joe suggests. On Fri, 11 Jan 2019 at 16:07, Joe Landman <joe.land...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On 1/11/19 7:59 AM, Richard Chang wrote: > > Hi, > > I would like to know if we have or can make( or prepare) a USB > > bootable OS that we can boot in a cluster and its nodes to test all > > its functionality. > > > > The purpose of this is to boot a new or existing cluster to check its > > health, including Infiniband network, any cards, local hard disks, > > memory etc, so that I don't have to disturb the existing OS and its > > configuration. > > > > If possible, it would be nice to boot the compute nodes from the > > master node. > > > > Anyone knows of any pre-existing distribution that will do the job ? > > Or know how to do it with Centos or Ubuntu ? > > FWIW: this is one of the uses cases of > https://github.com/joelandman/nyble . It works with CentOS, Debian, and > Ubuntu (though I've not pushed the 18.04.1 changes yet). > > I have a rudimentary USB target I was going to clean up soon, and the > images can be centrally booted from a pxe server, and pull/run scripts > post boot. > > Runs in RAM, you can modify the distributions to your hearts content. I > have a few private repos here which have NVidia + MLNX + other drivers > and related bits already built in. > > I've set up many systems with this, tying it together with > https://github.com/joelandman/tiburon for boot control. This was > originally used at Scalable Informatics when we were alive, and has > evolved significantly since then. > > If you want a simple pure USB distro for this, try SystemRescueCD, > though I don't think it does Infiniband, or most drivers. > > > -- > > Joe Landman > e: joe.land...@gmail.com > t: @hpcjoe > w: https://scalability.org > g: https://github.com/joelandman > l: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelandman > > _______________________________________________ > 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 >
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