Rosio Pavoris a blog

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May 1st, 2011 at 8:53 pm in Miscellany

If you were a USB/PXE-bootable Linux distro for HPC, what kind of features would you want to have?

3 Comments

  1. richardus!Ep8pui8Vw2 said,

    May 2nd, 2011 at 7:00 am

    ntpd

  2. Anonymous said,

    May 3rd, 2011 at 1:48 am

    Ubanto on XFS with full disk encryption.

    Why do you need to do HPC?

  3. Cairnarvon said,

    May 5th, 2011 at 7:35 pm

    Our Operating Systems II class uses ClusterKnoppix to make students aware HPC exists, but that project died and then openMosix itself did, so by way of graduating project this semester we (two other students and I) decided to make something to replace it. That was done, but since I have a lot of free time I decided to take our results and make it much nicer.

    What we have is a thing that boots off USB or a DVD (not a CD-ROM, at this point, because it’s slightly too big, but there’s a lot of crap we can still ditch) and automatically sets up a PXE server (and does some other things, like automatically maintain an MPI hostfile, because it uses Open MPI for clustering). The other nodes then boot off that and that’s basically it.
    With PXE we get file sharing (over NFS) for free, and there’s either Ganglia or sinfo for monitoring, but I’m not too sure what other things people are looking for in their clusters. MOSIX-style auto-discovery is essentially moot because all secondary nodes boot over PXE anyway (as per teacher request), though I guess we could do a hybrid thing where secondary nodes can boot off USB as well and try to figure out themselves whether there’s a running master node on the network already and join up.

    When the whole thing is polished I’ll put the build scripts on Github or somewhere. I don’t think I have the bandwidth to share ISOs.

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