Good Tutorial for Clusters

[Robert G. Brown]

On Tue, 7 May 2002, samson swanson wrote:

> hello again,
> 
> I been looking for a good tutorial on building my
> cluster. The ones I found so far seem to be really
> general.  (i.e. set the master to work with the slave
> nodes)
> 
> hmm don't know how to do that, and tutorial that
> explains what they tell you to do?

I'm not sure what you've found so far, but look at the various resources
on http://www.phy.duke.edu/brahma.  In particular:

  http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Beowulf-HOWTO.html

  http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/beowulf-faq.txt

  http://www.cris.com/~rjbono/html/pondermatic.html

and my very own

  http://www.phy.duke.edu/brahma/beowulf_online_book/

all seem to still work.  Pondermatic is written in tutorial style; the
rest may be too information dense or sparse in what you are looking for
to help you get started, but they'll still be decent references.

Also look on

  http://www.beowulf-underground.org/

where the Clemson folks have assembled a truly awe-inspiring beowulf
resource collection.  No reply would be incomplete without referring to
you

  http://www.scyld.com/

as well ("beowulf on a CD").

These days building a "generic" cluster is often not more complex that
installing an out-of-the-box distr, e.g. RH 7.3 (released yesterday,
hooray) and hand-picking the beowulfish packages already therein, such
as pvm from the list of available RPM's.

So my own "short form" recipe:

  Assemble generic x86/amd boxen on switched 100BT network with "decent"
NICs from the supported list (no RTL's, please) and adequate memory and
disk, likely minimum 128 MB/2 GB these days.
  Install RH 7.x (x = 2,3)
  Install PVM, MPICH, maybe LAM-MPI rpm's
  Install OpenSSH (sorry, this is MY recipe rsh fans:-)
  Configure the network and hosts so they have shared NFS home
directories, shared accounts, and are mutually ssh-accessible without a
password.  Lots of books at Amazon or B&N will tell you how to do this.
Books there on PVM and MPI, as well.
  Run the example programs in e.g. /usr/share/pvm3.
  Write your own programs, using the examples as templates or finding
more advanced help as required.

  Enjoy

     rgb

-- 
Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu