[Beowulf] Application Deployment
Mark Hahn
hahn at physics.mcmaster.ca
Sun Oct 10 08:43:11 PDT 2004
> RPMs or Debian. With Red Hat and descendents (Fedora, Centos) you can
> use kickstart, which is a lovely tool for installing clusters.
> Kickstart run on top of PXE and DHCP makes installing most systems a
> matter of turning them on (after making a single host specific MAC
don't forget the zero-install approach - nothing installed on nodes.
just export the nodes' root filesystem from a fileserver, and you never
have to do anything per-node. yum and rpm both let you install within
a separate tree, so the fileserver doesn't need to be running the same
config as the nodes.
obviously, this results in a certain amount of NFS traffic, as opposed
to having those files installed on the node's disk. issues:
- diskless nodes are very attractive in many contexts:
reliability, price, maintainability, etc.
- running NFS-root is a way of tolerating local disk faults;
lack of swap may or may not be a problem.
- NFS can easily be faster than local disk IO.
- in aggregate, a buch of diskless nodes will, in the worst case,
create much more traffic than your net and fileserver can handle.
- my experience so far with 50-100-node clusters is that a
single NFS-connected fileserver is actually pretty good.
(our nodes have a local disk used for things like checkpoints
of big parallel applications.)
- for big MPI clusters, it's extremely attractive to put
fileservers directly onto the MPI fabric. suddenly, gigabit
is no longer a limiter for file IO and systems like Lustre
can give some pretty impressive data rates.
- this scheme is probably optimal for very hetrogenous
datacenters as well, where you might boot a node in some
random OS purely for a particular user/app. that kind of thing
seems very dubious to me, but it would only take a few minutes
of perl scripting to write a web frontend to select things
like IP, distro, kernel, server, etc for a particular node,
and propogate the changes.
I think that for a small cluster, I'd consider having the nodes
with full installs on them. for anything larger than say 4 nodes,
I definitely prefer the root-on-fileserver approach with "ephemeral" nodes.
it's also pretty sexy to take a node out of the box, plug it in and have it
accept jobs in a minute or so with no manual intervention.
> course, require knowledge, experience, wisdom, and time to do right,
> which is why sysadmins get paid and are worth a very decent salary.
hmm. anyone for a cluster-admin salary survey?
regards, mark hahn.
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