[Beowulf] Pxe boot over infiniband

[Mark Hahn]

>> When googling for "pxe boot over infiniband" it seems this is not
>> possible
>> for all types of hardware. Is this correct? And if so, are there other
>> solutions (except connecting all nodes to a gigabit switch as well)?
>
> Go back to basics - get a keyboard/monitor and a USB CD drive.

well, maybe a usb flash stick.  I think that's what I'd do, and it would 
be pretty cheap, reliable, fast, etc.  the only thing on the flash stick 
would be to fetch and boot the usual kernel/initrd configuration, 
so the flash image would never need to change (and would be read-only, 
so presumably not prone to wear.  might need kexec if syslinux/etc can't
be persuaded to behave quite like this.

> Then again this means running network cables for your BMC/IPMI cards...

virtual media via BMC is a good idea, but sounds fragile and vendor-specific
to me.