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

[Jesse Becker]

On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 09:52:48AM -0500, Hearns, John wrote:
>
>>  * 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
>
>booting is rare and almost trivial, IO-wise.  there's no reason you
>shouldn't be able to boot several hundred clients over Gb.
>
>
>True.
>
>I never implemented it, but when I was with Streamline a colleague and I cooked up an idea
>to image large hard drive based clusters using  dd  and netcat  - you can dd the image of a hard drive,
>and use netcat to send that over the network to a fresh node. There is a multicast option in netcat - ie
>you can send out a stream and have multiple listeners.
>As I said we never implemented it - not really needed.

   http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/CoPs/patagonia/dolly.html

I used it several years ago, and it worked fine.

>
>Also as an aside SGI ICE clusters use Bittorrent to ship images around (or at least did when they used Tempo).

As does the Rocks cluster distribution (and derivatives), IIRC.

--
Jesse Becker
NHGRI Linux support (Digicon Contractor)