SMP support with the scyld package/codine/NFS

[Daniel Ridge]

On Wed, 14 Mar 2001, Marc Cozzi wrote:

> WOW, that was a fast response! Almost as fast as the
> DEC True-64 managers list.
> 
> Thanks for the replies Dan, Jag.

No problem. We use a sophisticated message sorting system that runs a
neural network on a Scyld Beowulf to prioritize our responses. :)

> Also used with all these systems is a common user file system
> NFS mounted on all boxes. User authentication is via NIS running
> on the SUN Solaris 8 systems. What documentation I could find for
> the Scyld software indicates that a master box must be setup with
> two Ethernets. One pointing to the "outside" and the other to the
> "inside". I assume this is running ipchains/ipforward and acting
> somewhat like a firewall. Is this going to cause problems/prevent
> me from using the existing NFS mounts and NIS authentication scheme?
> Can I just bring up all the Scyld nodes, including master Scyld system,
> on the internal network?

You can run a Scyld master node with just one ethernet. The easiset way to
do this is to supply "eth0:0" as the Beowulf address. This will overlay
a new IP address on top of eth0's regular address.

You can configure your nodes to participate in site-wide NFS if you like
-- although we don't currently provide any tools to help with this case.

With NIS -- this is something you can run on the frontend but which is
completely unnecessary on the nodes. With the Scyld software, one never
really 'logs in' to the nodes anyway. All jobs are 'pre authenticated' and
run with the UID that the job had on the frontend. If that frontend
happens to use NIS, no problem.

Our goal is for you to be able to treat a Scyld Beowulf system as
a single computer for the purposes site integration.

Regards,
	Dan Ridge
	Scyld Computing Corporation