[Beowulf] motherboards for diskless nodes

[Andrew Piskorski]

On Sat, Feb 26, 2005 at 10:59:57AM +0000, John Hearns wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-02-25 at 10:31 -0800, Greg Lindahl wrote:

> > Doesn't make any sense; I have seen people describe such systems where
> > they download a disk image when a batch job wants a different software
> > load. It's certainly doable that way: it does have different tradeoffs
> > from the diskless case, but if it gives you a headache, it's probably
> 
> I've always dreamed of using User Mode Linux images for this.

> And before anyone says it, yes performance would be a dog,

In that case, you should look into Xen.  I haven't heard of anyone
using it for HPC yet, but if I remember right, they claim only a 3% or
so performance loss running Linux virtualized under Xen vs. running on
the bare metal:

  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/

-- 
Andrew Piskorski <atp at piskorski.com>
http://www.piskorski.com/