In any case, we're getting Off Topic, I wanna make this a Gentoo Kluster (C)
(one may inster Kick Ass somewhere in there :P ). Moreover, I am _mandated_
to do this as part of my masters _and_ document this.... Document which I
will of course make available to the Gentoo community. I'm almost thinking of
looking onto either an ebuild or even a special "profile" for making the
node's ROOT image (with a modified baselayout)....
So, as always, if anyone can help out in either pointing to documents or
sharing experience, I would be more than glad to put this together and really
put Gentoo on the HPC map.
I tried to bang together something like this while I was building a
cluster for our department. It's real tricky though, especially if you
don't want to mount root over NFS--and mounting root over NFS always
seems like a huge amount of overhead to me. I was able to get a second
box booting off tftp and mounting filesystems across nfs, but I didn't
have any idea how to set about making a boot image and transmitting that
to a ramdisk to boot off of.
Have you checked out warewulf? It's quite good; a complete ramdisk
based cluster setup package. I switched to it after failing with
gentoo. If I was going to approach this project, I would rip warewulf
apart and see how they do what they do. Warewulf is RPM based, but it
should be easy to convert a lot of the RPM steps in warewulf to
ebuilds. Then you could make an ebuild to generate the ramdisk image,
like warewulf does. In any case, Warewulf has solved a lot of these
problems in a different context; check it out.
http://www.warewulf-cluster.org/cgi-bin/trac.cgi
It also has tools to manage a cluster, observe processess on the nodes,
etc. I'm really, really happy with it, except for the "not working with
gentoo" part of it.
Jordan
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