[Beowulf] PXE boot with X7DWT-INF IB onboard card

[Vincent Diepeveen]

On Nov 12, 2012, at 12:41 PM, Hearns, John wrote:

> My questions are:
>
>   * any body using the same (or similar main boards) and was able to
> boot using PXE?

I have supermicro X7DWE motherboards here.

PXE works, yet the bios of the motherboard doesn't allow Mellanox QDR  
cards to be booted here.

See supermicro website, they just fixed 1 type of bios for that for 1  
specific motherboard in that series
and that isn't the X7DWE.

At boot time it always switches to the intel firmware that's inside  
and boots the internal gigabit ethernet adapters.

>   * if PXE server with Infiniband is impossible, then it is OK with a
> gigabyte connection? Or should we go for 16 disks for these 16 clients
> and dont care much on boot over IB or IP? (more money, of course)
>
>
> My advice - use the gigabit Ethernet connection for PXE booting the  
> nodes,
> and also configure an IP Address on the gigabit when the cluster is  
> up.
> Use that address for general administration of the nodes, and for  
> the batch system.
>
> Create a second network with the Infiniband interfaces, with a  
> different IP Address range.
> use that for storage traffic (ie your NFS mounts) and for MPI traffic.
>
> Which cluster toolkit are you using to install the nodes?
>
>
>
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