[Beowulf] Create cluster : questions

[Ed Hill]

On Mon, 4 Sep 2006 21:23:03 +0200
"Maxence Dunnewind" <maxenced at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi.
> 
> i'm a user of the Ubuntu Linux OS, and also a packager for this OS.
> As you may know , packaging can be take a lot of time, mainly
> during building process.
> I would create a public cluster for help packagers. All Ubuntu
> users can accept we use their computers on the cluster. But the
> cluster system MUST only use free ressource of this computers (and
> maybe user could set a quota)...
> 
> i want people only have to install some software (no kernel
> compilation or other things).
> 
> I want know if beowulf could works in this case ????


Hi Maxence,

Have you looked at distcc?  Its probably closest to what you're
requesting:

  http://distcc.samba.org/


I help out with Fedora Extras so I can certainly appreciate the time
that goes into compiling packages!  It would be nice to have a
distributed build system with per-compilation-unit (eg. per-object-
file) granularity.  But I'm afraid it may be a somewhat complicated
task for, for instance, Fedora Extras since the FE build system uses
a chroot-ed environment (the "mock" package) to ensure build
cleanliness and the presence of all the needed dependencies.  Maybe
NFS-mounting the chroot would be sufficient...?

If you split up the work on a per-package and per-architecture basis
(i386, x86-64, ppc, etc.) then its relatively (!) straight-forward to
build a cluster with the necessary hardware and perform builds of
separate packages/arches on a simultaneous (each in different chroots
on potentially different machines) basis.  Thats exactly what the
current Fedora Extras build system (called "plague") does.  You can
see some details at:

  http://buildsys.fedoraproject.org/build-status/index.psp
  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras/BuildSystemClientSetup

And I only discuss Fedora Extras because its what I'm familiar with.
I'd be curious to hear how build systems work for other distros!

Ed

-- 
Edward H. Hill III, PhD  |  ed at eh3.com  |  http://eh3.com/