[Beowulf] where to start building ur own cluster distro

[Jon Aquilina]

desktop interface at least for the master node. then the others can pxe boot
from the master. i know this becomes problematic the large the cluster. for
now i think starting like this would be good to have a distro for people
such as myself who are quite new to clustering.

On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 4:48 PM, Jakob Oestergaard <jakob at unthought.net>
wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 03:56:31PM +0200, Jon Aquilina wrote:
> > ive been thinking bout building an easy to use cluster distro based on
> > kubuntu where would the ideal place for me to start. the desktop
> interface
> > the kernel?
>
> How about "neither"  ?  :)
>
> I don't mean to discourage you, but I can't help but being a little bit
> sceptic
> about the purpose and usefulness of all of this.
>
> Honestly, if I were to install a new cluster, I'd worry about
> *) Libraries  (ATLAS and gmp for the hardware, a good MPI)
> *) Job control server and tools (SGE?)
> *) Proper single-sign on (Kerberos authentication) and generally proper
>   integration between the systems (I don't know if NFSv4 works these days,
> but
>   if it does that would be truly fantastic coupled with automount and a
>   directory for authorization and mount maps)
>
> Possibly if it was for development of simulation tools and not production
> runs
> of "finished" tools, I'd want development tools like valgrind, binutils
> and a
> good new gcc suite.
>
> I'm sure the good people on this list have more requirements.
>
> The kernel should "just work". Outside of having a properly patched
> actually
> working kernel configured for server usage (which many distros, including
> ubuntu, have these days) with the proper NUMA awareness and bit width (64
> of'em) to deal with the hardware, there's not much won from fiddling with
> it.
> Really, if your code spends its time in the kernel, you have much bigger
> problems  :)
>
> And desktop interface?  On a cluster what for?
>
>
> --
>
>  / jakob
>
>


-- 
Jonathan Aquilina
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