On Thursday 17 November 2005 14.59, Eric Thibodeau wrote: > I would have scanned the mailling list for this but never found the > search engine for it... > > As the title says, I would love to see a Gentoo clustering solution > based on the www.clustermatic.org/www.ltsp.org approach (basically, > PXE booted OS). In fact, work on this would open up Gentoo to both > clustering and LTSP usage. Most of the work that needs to be done, > if I am not mistaken, is to create a Gentoo environment which is > NFS bootable as done with LTSP. We could then "easily" manage the > tolls and utilities available on the slave nodes by using portage. > Obviously, there is also some kernel tweaking involved but we can > start from some previous work done in that aera in all cases. > > I am actually asked to build a Gentoo based cluster next semester > and I would definately like to build it to be as flexible and > scalable as possible. I believe that the above approach fits these > requirements quite well. So I'm opened to any suggestions for this > project. Obviously, I'll document this and attempt to make the > procedure as accessible to anyone as possible. > > Future work would probably be to seamlessly integrate OpenPBS into > such a PXE-able environment to enable it to reboot/configure nodes > as required for given tasks/profiles. > > Thanks, > > Eric Thibodeau
Hello folks This is actually quite doable with gentoo, and not too hard I might add. I'm surely no gentoo/linux-wiz, and I have banged together something like this. I have built several different clusters by the setup since 2002 and it seems to work ok. SSI: single system image. All servers and nodes run off the shared root image, no problem with local installs and duplicating binaries. Diskless boot: all nodes can boot diskless over pxe => dhcp => tftp => nfs Root over nfs: just one file system tree, nothing on diskless nodes. Swap, and local tmp storage on nodes that have disks. Openmosix, mpi, pvm, gridengine, custom batch queues etc for the clustering. The apps I write usually use fork and forget over OpenMosix. It's just soooo simple. And since openmosix helps with load balancing you can use the nodes as regular workstations as well. I wouldn't recommend using the servers as workstations for stability reasons, even if it is possible. My own constant pre-alpha test cluster runs from whatever I happend to have available, and is home-based on my workstation. But my production clusters have dedicated servers. A nice side effect is that most if not all of the system is somewhat hot-swappable. I can even swap the servers on a running cluster, with some restrictions. Yes I know it sounds crazy, but I've done it successfully several times. No duplicate system trees and binaries, just tweak with selective /etc/init.d scripts and such. A few init.d scripts has to be slightly changed from the gentoo originals, along with /sbin/rc and /sbin/functions.sh. The nodes can have different config files. But that is a very minor overhead. I have posted on this topic before, but there hasn't been much interest. If you want to try it then contact me and I'll see if I can whip up a quick terse description. Then we can flesh it out as we go. But I don't have time to actually write something nice for quite a while, unfortunately. Harebrafolk Jimmy -- [email protected] mailing list
