[Beowulf] naked machines

Jamie Rollins jrollins at phys.columbia.edu
Thu Sep 22 10:04:11 PDT 2005


Yes.  I have setup such a cluster.  There is no requirement that the cluster
nodes have disks.  A computer without disks is usually called "diskless".
Research how to boot a machine disklessly (with the package lessdisks[1], for
instance), using the PXE boot protocol, tftp, and an NFS root filesystem.
There's quite a bit of information on the internet pertaining to diskless
operation.  I learned a lot about looking into how the lessdisks package works.

Good luck.

jamie.

[1] lessdisks - http://lessdisks.net/


On Thu, Sep 22, 2005 at 01:05:01PM +0200, massimiliano cialdi wrote:
> is it possible to run acluster in which some machines are "naked"?
> I mean a computer with only mother board (with an integrated NIC to
> boot up), cpu and ram; without any mass storage device (such hard
> disk, floppy or CD), keyboard, mouse and graphic card.
> 
> thanks
> --
> Massimiliano Cialdi
> cialdi at gmail.com
> m.cialdi at oksys.it
> 
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