[Beowulf] SATA II - PXE+NFS - diskless compute nodes

[Michael Will]

The standard pxe server code had issues with larger amounts of clients
wanting to boot at the same time. Some of them would time out and not
make it. Donald Becker reimplemented the server side of it to solve the
issues. I don't know anything more specific than that, but if you are
interested I am sure he would not mind if you where to contact him
directly. 

Michael
-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Shook [mailto:eric-shook at uiowa.edu] 
Sent: Tuesday, December 12, 2006 9:27 AM
To: Michael Will
Cc: Buccaneer for Hire.; beowulf at beowulf.org
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] SATA II - PXE+NFS - diskless compute nodes

Michael,

This should be sufficient enough to run our software stack as they are
tested on rhel 4 variants.  I will most definitely look closer at scyld
CW4 to see if it fits our needs.

What does reimplementing pxe boot mean specifically?

Thanks,
Eric

Michael Will wrote:
> Scyld CW4 is based on RHEL4 and also supported on Centos 4. That does 
> not give you different operating systems though, just flexible 
> deployment of RHEL4 based HPC compute nodes.
> 
> Note that we had to reimplement the PXE boot part to allow reasonable 
> scaling.
> 
> Michael
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org]
> On Behalf Of Eric Shook
> Sent: Saturday, December 09, 2006 11:28 AM
> To: Buccaneer for Hire.
> Cc: beowulf at beowulf.org
> Subject: Re: [Beowulf] SATA II - PXE+NFS - diskless compute nodes
> 
> Not to diverge this conversation, but has anyone had any experience 
> using this pxe boot / nfs model with a rhel variant?  I have been 
> wanting to do a nfs root or ramdisk model for some-time but our 
> software stack requires a rhel base so Scyld and Perceus most likely 
> will not work (although I am still looking into both of them to make 
> sure)
> 
> Thanks for any help,
> Eric Shook
> 
> Buccaneer for Hire. wrote:
>> [snip]
>>
>>   
>>> I agree with what Joe says about a few hundred nodes being the time 
>>> you would start to look closer at this approach.
>>>     
>> I have started to explore the possibility of using this technology
> because I would really like to see us with the ability to change OSs 
> and OS Personalities as needed.  The question I have is with 2000+ 
> compute nodes what kind of infrastructure do I need to support this?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>>
>>  
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--
Eric Shook (319) 335-6714
Technical Lead, Systems and Operations - GROW http://grow.uiowa.edu