[Beowulf] RAID for home beowulf

[Nifty Tom Mitchell]

On Mon, Oct 05, 2009 at 12:02:11PM +0200, Tomislav Maric wrote:
> Nifty Tom Mitchell wrote:
> > On Sun, Oct 04, 2009 at 01:08:27PM +0200, Tomislav Maric wrote:
> >> Mark Hahn wrote:
> >>>> I've seen Centos mentioned a lot in connection to HPC, am I making a
> >>>> mistake with Ubuntu??
> >>> distros differ mainly in their desktop decoration.  for actually 
> >>> getting cluster-type work done, the distro is as close to irrelevant
> >>> as imaginable.  a matter of taste, really.  it's not as if the distros
> >>> provide the critical components - they merely repackage the kernel,
> >>> libraries, middleware, utilities.  wiring yourself to a distro does
> >>> affect when you can or have to upgrade your system, though.
> >>>
> > 
> > An interesting perspective is to have a cluster built
> > on the same distro as your desktop because....
.....
> 
> OK, I guess then Ubuntu will suffice for a 12 node Cluster. :) Anyway,
> I'll try it and see. Thanks!

I think it will work just fine for you.

As you structure thiings make it clear in your mind where important data
lives. Also, that compute nodes commonly do not contain data long term and that in
most cluster admin environments they get re-imaged at the drop of a hat
and upgraded as a group so all the nodes in a cluster always "look the same"
to your programs.

N.B. This is not strictly true when using a cluster based
file system.  The common practice of reimaging nodes all 
the same except the IP address will have to also address
the distributed FS components.

And, Perhaps overkill for a personal cluster.
While youd are tinkering and researching look at the ROCKS solution to
clustering.  ROCKS is best described as a management package that lives
on top of RHEL or CentOS.   It includes all the necessary components
for a larger (midsized) central managed multi user MPI compute cluster,
user management, batch system, kickstart, management database etc.
If you download it and CentOS then deploy it on your compute nodes for
a test drive you may learn a bit about all the moving parts needed to
manage a midsized cluster.  Their solution has a very specific set of 
goals and if they match your needs it is way cool.  If not it is 
not flexible and might be painful.  Do download the documentation to scan.

Also bookmark "http://www.clustermonkey.net/"!



-- 
	T o m  M i t c h e l l 
	Found me a new hat, now what?