Hi Sami,
You might want to take a look at some of my scratch notes on
building nodes for a clustering environment, inspired by LTSP:
http://wiki.neuralbs.com/index.php/Installing_Gentoo_...
Be warned, you will have a hard time finding a diskless solution for both
clustering _and_ LTSP-ish use...this is why I am fiddling with Gentoo and,
eventually, apply project MueCow to it so we can (easily) have hybrids..
Eric
On Fri, 14 Jul 2006, H. Sami Sozuer wrote:
> Ken Cobler wrote:
> > H. Sami Sozuer wrote:
> >> Hi folks,
> >>
> >> We have a 20-node cluster that we want to use both as diskless
> >> workstations
> >> that connect to a dual Xeon machine as X terminals and as nodes of
> >> our cluster
> >> that can run MPI programs. We've installed the ltsp
> >> server on a FC5 and tried out a client and there is no problem, the
> >> client
> >> gets the gdm login window and can run programs on the server. However,
> >> since we also need to run MPI programs via ssh on the nodes, we need
> >> to have
> >> a lot of the standard gcc, glibc, MPI etc on each node. The basic
> >> ltsp filesystem
> >> in /opt/ltsp/i386 is very insufficient for this job and simply
> >> copying files from /lib /bin /usr
> >> etc onto the clients' / directory seems, ... well just not right. Has
> >> anyone tackled a problem
> >> of this sort before? What is the best way to go about installing
> >> these programs on the client
> >> filesystem? I can ssh to the diskless clients, no problem there.
> >>
> >> Thanks for any pointers
> >> Sami
> >>
> >> PS. The reason we don't want to use the hard disks of the clients is
> >> because of the frequent
> >> power outages. We can maintain continuous power the server which
> >> houses the hard disks but
> >> with 20 machines it's just not feasible.
> >>
> > I don't know what MPI is, however, the concept behind LTSP is Terminal
> > Services. Which means a Linux server can host and run many
> > applications for many terminals. So, by running the application on
> > the client, you are defeating the purpose of having a terminal
> > server. Run the application on the server and have the output go to
> > the client terminal.
> >
> > If you are implying that MPI is a CUI based program which requires you
> > to ssh into the server, then so be it. If you are looking for better
> > terminal emulation, you can get putty (a popular Windows based
> > terminal emulation program) in source code for Linux to compile for
> > your machine.
> >
> > Perhaps you can explain MPI and it's features or limitations, and why
> > you wouldn't want it to run on the server only.
> >
> > Ken Cobler
> Ken,
>
> MPI stands for Message Passing Interface and it's the most popular way
> of running
> parallel programs on many machines. So MPI itself is not a program but a
> means for
> programs running on many nodes of a cluster to communicate and work on a
> single job.
> What we have is a student computer lab that gets used for about 10 hours
> a week, and in terms
> of CPU usage, the yearly average would probably be less than 0.1 per
> cent! Imagine all those
>
> CPUs just sitting idly for nearly their entire lifetime.
> So what we thought would be smart was to have each machine connect to a
> server, LTSP style,
> and use the CPU resources of the server, while we wanted to run number
> crunching applications
> on the CPUs of each individual node (3GHz P4 Prescott). The server alone
> is just too inadequate for
> the number crunching jobs we have. The problem was that the programs
> installed on the client
> nodes' filesystem was too inadequate, and it was very difficult to
> install programs on the server
> when you chroot /opt/ltsp/i386 and try the configure&&make&&make install
> routine.
> But I tried copying the files by hand and it looks like maybe it will be
> possible to get things working
> anyhow.
>
> I like ltsp because of the local device support, and NFS swapping and so
> on. Of course it wasn't
> designed for using a student computer lab as a HPC cluster, but with the
> current speed of processors
> and the prices of GigE switches, I have a feeling there will be more
> people trying to build this
> type of "dual use" labs in the near future.
>
>
> Sami
>
>
>
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-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security?
Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier
Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo
http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642
_____________________________________________________________________
Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto:
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss
For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.freenode.net
