On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 11:18 PM, Mark Hahn<[email protected]> wrote: >> That brings me to another important question. Any hints on speccing >> the head-node? > > I think you imply a single, central admin/master/head node. this is a very > bad idea. first, it's generally a bad idea to have users on a fileserver. > next, it's best to keep cluster-infrastructure > (monitoring, management, pxe, scheduling) on a dedicated admin machine. > for 300 compute nodes, it might be a good idea to provide more than one > login node (for editing, compilation, etc).
To expand on Mark's comment... I would SPEC >=2 systems for head/masters and either spread the load of the required services (e.g. management, monitoring and other sysadmin tasks and put scheduling on the other) OR put all of the services on a single master and then run a shadow master for redundancy. I would not put users on either of these systems. If you were using Perceus..... I would either create an interactive VNFS capsule (include compilers, additional libs, etc..) or make a large more bloated compute VNFS capsule and use that on all of the nodes. In this scenario, all nodes could run stateless *and* diskful so if you need to change the number of interactive nodes you can do it with a simple command sequence: # perceus vnfs import /path/to/interactive.vnfs # perceus node set vnfs interactive n000[0-4] and/or # perceus vnfs import /path/to/compute.vnfs # perceus node set vnfs compute n0[004-299] Have your cake and eat it too. :) The file system needs to be built to handle the load of the apps. 300 nodes means you can go from the low end (Linux RAID and NFS) to a higher end NFS solution, or upper end of a parallel file system or maybe even one of each (NFS and parallel) as they solve some different requirements. -- Greg Kurtzer http://www.infiscale.com/ http://www.perceus.org/ http://www.caoslinux.org/ _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
