revamping our beowulf

[Felix Rauch]

On Thu, 5 Sep 2002, Tintin J Marapao wrote:
> I am actually more concerned about how I can go about cloning the nodes
> efficiently...with the least amount of anxiety

For cloning we use our own tool called "Dolly". It uses a virtual TCP
chain to distribute large files or partitions from one node to all the
other nodes in a cluster. It works very well if you have a switched
network.

For documentation, source codes and a list of publications, see [1]
and search for "Dolly". If you want to try a more recent version of
the source, write me personally (I did not yet have the time to update
the webpage).

We use Dolly to clone our 128 node cluster "xibalba" [2,3]. Cloning a
20 GB disk to all nodes takes less than 30 minutes (with two 100
MBit/s NICs per node).

- Felix

[1] http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/CoPs/patagonia/
[2] http://www.xibalba.inf.ethz.ch/
[3] http://www.inf.ethz.ch/research/next/infrastructure.html
-- 
Felix Rauch                      | Email: rauch at inf.ethz.ch
Institute for Computer Systems   | Homepage: http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/~rauch/
ETH Zentrum / RZ H18             | Phone: +41 1 632 7489
CH - 8092 Zuerich / Switzerland  | Fax:   +41 1 632 1307