Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Should I go for diskless or not?

[Arend Dittmer]

Hi Dr. Cool 

 

Have a look at Scyld ClusterWare ... I admit, I work for the vendor but I ask you to please still read on ;=)

 

Scyld was conceived by the co-inventor of the Beowulf project Don Becker. With Scyld, compute nodes run diskless. However, the diskless image provides only a minimal OS environment with a memory footprint of about  50MB. The small footprint is due to the fact that libraries and binaries are pulled in from a central master node 'on demand' and are cached locally so you only use memory for OS components that are really needed at runtime.

 

You only need to install the OS and Scyld on one head node and then boot the compute nodes.  Due to the small footprint they are 'up and running' in about ½ minute. The other cool thing is that Scyld provides a uniform process space that gives you an SMP look and feel for the entire cluster. 

 

If you are interested you can check out a free eval here:

 

http://www.penguincomputing.com/cluster_computing/scyld_clusterware <http://www.penguincomputing.com/cluster_computing/scyld_clusterware> 

 

Cheers

 

Arend

 

 

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