[Beowulf] motherboards for diskless nodes

John Hearns john.hearns at streamline-computing.com
Sat Feb 26 02:59:57 PST 2005


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.
In a Grid-based world, prepare a UML instance which has all the
libraries and runtime to run your code. Ship it across the grid with
your executable. 
The cluster at the receiving end can be running any distribution - it
runs your UML in a sandbox.

And before anyone says it, yes performance would be a dog,
and I don't see how UML could access all those nice Myrinet and
Infiniband cards. SO I'm definitely blue-skying.




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