[Beowulf] about managment

[Tim Mattox]

You should look at any of a variety of cluster management
software packages.  Some are free, some are commercial.
Here is a short list that I can name off the top of my head:
Rocks, Clustermatic, Oscar, Warewulf, Scyld and others.

I'm a co-developer of Warewulf, a free one that has a
fairly unique approach to the problem.  You can find
out more on it's website: http://warewulf-cluster.org/

The short version is that Warewulf builds a ramdisk
image that it uses to network boot the nodes.  The
ramdisk is built from a Virtual Node File System (VNFS)
that is maintained on the boot server.  You can use pretty
much any RPM based Linux distribution for the boot
server and the VNFS.

With this approach, the nodes get a fresh filesystem
at boot time, without any worries about version or
package creep.  Adding or upgrading programs
and changing the list of users is very easy.

Good luck.

On Sat, 16 Oct 2004 02:38:45 +0800, llwaeva at 21cn.com <llwaeva at 21cn.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>   I am running 8-node LAM/MPI parallel computing system. I found it's
> trouble to maintain the user accounts and software distribution on all
> the nodes. For example, whenever I install a new software , I have to
> repeat the job 8 times! The most annoying thing is that the
> configuration or managment of the user accounts over the network is a
> heavy job. Someone suggests that I should utilize NFS and NIS. However,
> in my case, it's difficult to have an additional computer as a server.
> Would anyone please share your experience in maintaining the beowulf
> cluster?
> 
> Thanks in advance.

-- 
Tim Mattox - tmattox at gmail.com - http://homepage.mac.com/tmattox/