PXE bootiing/support/ Re: Installing Linux (without CD/floppies)

[Ken Chase]

On Mon, Feb 17, 2003 at 07:48:26PM -0800, Jim Lux's all...
> Anybody know if the VIA Apollo PLE 133 chipset (as used in the VIA mobos)
> supports PXE?  It's not entirely obvious from the website.
> The $200 computers from Walmart, for instance, use this chipset.  And, more
> to what I'm interested in, VIA has a number of mobos with 12V only input,
> very low power, using a variety of their processors.

Those low power CPUs are EXTREMELY slow.

I had a 600 Mhz jobbie, and it ran the d.dppc Gromacs benchmark on 
a single CPU 25 *TIMES* slower than a 2.2 Ghz Xeon!

Might be worth it for TCO over 5-10 years if your power isnt cheap, though ;)

Also they can run fanless, so diskless nodes end up with no moving parts!

/kc

> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Mark Hahn" <hahn at physics.mcmaster.ca>
> To: <beowulf at beowulf.org>
> Sent: Monday, February 17, 2003 5:55 PM
> Subject: RE: Installing Linux (without CD/floppies)
> 
> 
> > > >What's the best way to install Linux RedHat in a 40-node
> > > >Beowulf whose nodes don't have neither floppy nor
> >
> > why *install* at all?  so far at least, I'm booting my new cluster
> > entirely diskless.  each node actually has a disk, but nothing is
> > installed on it - everything is PXE and NFS.  obviously, this is
> > more network-intensive, but is it really an issue if your jobs last
> > for more than a couple minutes?
> >
> > > As long as your network cards' support PXE (most do nowadays), then it
> is
> >
> > is that really true?  great if so!  I haven't looked, but tend to only
> > expect builtin eth to support PXE...
> >
> > > The only potentially laborious step is collecting the MAC address first
> and
> > > tweaking each BIOS to enable PXE booting.
> >
> > dhcpd can allocate IPs from a pool; if you don't need stable IPs,
> > you don't need to collect the MAC...
> >
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-- 
Ken Chase, math at velocet.ca  *  Velocet Communications Inc.  *  Toronto, CANADA