[Beowulf] Diskless cluster provisioning/installation

[Joe Landman]

On 11/04/2015 04:06 AM, tegner at renget.se wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I need to set up a diskless cluster. Some years ago I did this using
> Perceus, http://www.perceus.org/. Wored nicely, but since I know there
> are several other systems around; e.g., Warewulf,
> http://warewulf.lbl.gov/trac or
> http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/Warewulf-Cluster-Manager-Master-and-Compute-Nodes,
> and Onesis, http://onesis.org/ I just wanted to check what people are
> using these days.
>
> is there one system in particular which is more actively developed? Or
> do people tend to use different, more "basic" tools these days?

Open source:  Warewulf is your go-to system.  Does clustering, very 
well.  Xcat is out there and in use (actually Xcat2 from what I 
see/hear).  Onesis  was neat when I played with it a while ago, but I am 
not sure how up to date it is.

Closed source: Bright's system, probably a few others

We took the track of developing our own, as we needed much greater 
flexibility than cluster distros allowed.  This was also due, in part, 
to linux distros and their (famously) broken init/startup bits, not to 
mention how they handle networking, and many other things.  Don't get me 
started on their kernels.



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Joseph Landman, Ph.D
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