Beowulf OS and Installation

[Kevin Wood]

>From personal experience, RedHat 6 and 7 are very good to work with.  PVM
already comes precompiled and installed with RedHat 6+ and there is really
very little to setup else wise.  Here is a good link to get you started....

http://www.xtreme-machines.com/x-cluster-qs.html

You can get away with a custom install (base, network, cluster, nfs server,
code development, kernel development [if you need to run mosix or something]
and possibly a couple of others.)  This should limit your space requirement.
Obviously you don't need language files unless your staff comes from
different nationalities and you probably won't need gimp (Man I can't wait
til that goes clusterable! It'll have photoshop all over the place.)

As far as package requirements go, any RedHat distro should cover the bases.
The only other packages you might want are..

MPICH - http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/mpich/
SCMS - http://www.beowulf-underground.org/software.html (You can find the
link here as well as other software)
NTP Setup - (http://www.ntp.org) for setting up the time protocol.  RedHat
includes the software.

Please feel free to e-mail the list if you run into trouble!

Good luck and happy clustering.
Kevin Wood
GSHiis, Inc.
http://www.gshiis.com
kwood at gshiis.com

  -----Original Message-----
  From: beowulf-admin at beowulf.org [mailto:beowulf-admin at beowulf.org]On
Behalf Of AskB0b at aol.com
  Sent: Friday, February 22, 2002 3:09 AM
  To: beowulf at beowulf.org
  Subject: Beowulf OS and Installation


  I am doing some research on parallel computing for my Senior thesis and
the time has come to put aside all my written work and build a Beowulf
cluster.

  I was curious as to if Redhat was an acceptable choice and if version 5,
6, or 7 was preferred?  I am working with very limited HDs so I need to know
what packages are necessary and which ones aren't so important.

  I do have some networking experience but a rather limited knowledge of
Linux.
  I am excited and eager to learn though, so bear with me  ; )



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