[Beowulf] Cluster install and admin approach (newbie question)

[Tim Cutts]

On 28 Aug 2009, at 11:37 am, madskaddie at gmail.com wrote:

> That issue I see it by another point of view: finally I will learn
> something really new. Yes, I will loose time  but I hope that in the
> end all players will win: me because I got money and know how and the
> cluster users because we doubled the capacity (not really because I
> don't believe that mixing the nodes will possible) so more people can
> run code.
>
> But the question remains unanswered ;) and is not tied to the
> "heterogeneous cluster" problem:  If diskless what about "/var" like
> issues; if not, what do you use to install and manage it

We also use Debian.  We also use a heterogenous cluster (since our  
workload is embarrassingly parallel and the individual jobs are mostly  
single threaded, this doesn't really matter).

We use FAI for installation, since our nodes are not diskless, rsyslog  
for logging to a central log server, which is running Splunk.  We use  
cfengine 2 for configuration management.

We don't have diskless nodes, so the /var problem doesn't exist for us.

Regards,

Tim


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