<x-flowed> Teresa,
see comments below. regards, Mike Teresa Carrigan wrote:
Thanks to all who replied both on and off-list to my post on Mandrake 8.1 installation errors. We have ordered Redhat, Mandrake 8.2, as well as Scyld and will be trying each of these with test-bed clusters of 3 nodes before we do it with the intended machines. The results of our test-beds should give us an interesting publication as well as valuable experience for our students. Questions in an attempt to avoid problems in installing Oscar: [1] Some of the literature states a need for nodes to be on an Ethernet. We have Ethernet cards which are currently connecting nodes through a high-speed switch. Will we need a hub connecting them in order to install Oscar, or is the switch fine? We do NOT mind doing manual installs on the client nodes as long as we know what to do. [that's what the students are for!] On the official research cluster, we will want to operate over the high-speed switch.
Either a hub or switch will work fine for installation. A hub just reflects all incoming traffic to all ports, whereas a switch directs incoming traffic to the affected ports only. The performance of parallel programs will most likely be better when you use a switch, however.
On a sidenote, send my condolences to your students ... 8-). It might speed up things if you install via ftp instead of manually inserting CD-ROMS.
[2] The test-bed PCs are standard Pentium IIs. However, the research PCs that we want to use eventually are Dell Precision Workstation 530 MTs with dual Xeon processors. Will the dual processors cause problems with Oscar?
You have to make sure you use a SMP kernel on the node to use both cpus. If you mistakenly wind up with an UP kernel the OS will only use a single cpu on each node.
[3] I understand that Oscar wipes the existing operating systems off the clients. We want our research machines to have a separate [non-cluster] Windows 2000 partition. Does anyone have experience with this setup? We don't like having to reinstall Windows 2000 and all the software, but is it at least *possible* to do without interfering with Linux and Oscar?
Yes. Done that, but I manually changed /var/lib/systemimager/scripts/oscarimage.[name of head node]
Depending on the disk layout, you'd also have to change the systemimager/systemconfigurator configuration files under /etc
In other words, it does require some trickery, and I'd recommend you _test_ the setup to ensure you don't accidentally wipe out partitions before you deploy.
TIA for all the advice. This is our first foray into Linux and clusters, although Blackburn College used to be deep into parallel programming [before lightning wiped out our expensive hardware]. Teresa W. Carrigan Professor of Computer Science Blackburn College Carlinville, IL 62626 [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek PC Mods, Computing goodies, cases & more http://thinkgeek.com/sf _______________________________________________ Oscar-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/oscar-users
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