[Beowulf] reboot without passing through BIOS?

[Chris Samuel]

----- "Robert G. Brown" <rgb at phy.duke.edu> wrote:

> Hmmm, I did think about this once upon a time when I lusted
> after nighttime use of a Windows cluster in a lab here as
> a linux cluster. I remember that there was an automatable
> solution, but I don't remember what it is. 

It's probably not hard to knock one up from scratch,
you'd need an automated shutdown on the boxes in 'doze,
make sure they have WOL and PXE set up, and then on the
management node start a DHCP server configured to do
diskless processing for them from cron and send them
a WOL signal once it's up.

As long as your scheduler has reservations for the
lab hours to stop jobs overrunning then you should
be able to shut them down nicely (again from cron,
along with the DHCP server) ready for the 'doze users
in the morning.

Of course it'd get more complicated if you have
multiple DHCP servers and PXE already in use on
that network for those machines!

-- 
Christopher Samuel - (03) 9925 4751 - Systems Manager
 The Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing
 P.O. Box 201, Carlton South, VIC 3053, Australia
VPAC is a not-for-profit Registered Research Agency