Scyld, Athlon, and Asus A7V?

[Jim Phillips]

Thank you!!!  This did it.  Step 4 was actually necessary too - when UDMA
was set to disabled the kernel would hang, setting it to 4 fixed this.  Of
course steps 1-3 were also required as far as I can tell.  I also
commented out the hdparm line in Scyld's node_up script but that was
before fixing the BIOS so I don't know if it had an effect or not.

In any case, 4 nodes are up, and Scyld is working as promised.  Now if the
shelves would only arrive we could get the entire cluster online.  ;-)

-Jim


On Fri, 5 Jan 2001, Keith Underwood wrote:

> As a matter of fact, I'm slowly putting together 16 1GHz Athlons, same
> motherboard.  You need to change a couple of things:
> 
> 1) turn off the virus protection in the BIOS
> 2) Change the hard disk mode to "User HDD" instead of "Auto"
> 3) Make sure the addressing mode is LBA
> 4) Change the UDMA setting to something appropriate (we are using IBM
> Deskstar drives and the 80 conductor cables, so I chose 4)
> 
> That last step is just if you want disk performance.  I went from 14 MB/s
> disk access (hdparm and Bonnie reporting w/ a 1GB file size) to 34 MB/s.
> 
> 					Keith
> 
> 
> 
> On Fri, 5 Jan 2001, Jim Phillips wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> >
> > So, we've just gotten 18 1.1GHz Athlon machines and we're testing out
> > Scyld.  The one test machine we had worked fine (installed with the Scyld
> > disk but just ran 1 CPU benchmarks).  Now we're trying to get the slaves
> > working but the disk partitions keep getting corrupted.  Everything worked
> > great on an old Pentium 200MHz we had sitting around and we didn't have
> > any real problems installing the master either.  These are Asus A7V
> > motherboards with Promise PCI-ATA100 controllers and Western Digital 20GB
> > drives.  Is there anything in the two kernel monte procedure that could be
> > causing this problem?  Do we need a newer kernel than 2.2.16?  Is
> > something wrong with sfdisk running on the slave nodes?  Something creepy
> > in the BIOS?  Anyone else have experience with these?
> >
> > -Jim
> >
> >
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> 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Keith Underwood                   Parallel Architecture Research Lab (PARL)
> keithu at parl.clemson.edu                                  Clemson University
> 
> 
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