[Beowulf] Fault tolerance & scaling up clusters (was Re: Bright Cluster Manager)

[Roland Fehrenbacher]

>>>>> "JH" == John Hearns via Beowulf <beowulf at beowulf.org> writes:

    JH> Roland, the OpenHPC integration IS interesting.  I am on the
    JH> OpenHPC list and look forward to the announcement there.

Yes, we'll post there when ready.

    JH> On 17 May 2018 at 15:00, "R" = Roland Fehrenbacher <rf at q-leap.de>
    JH> wrote:
    
    >>>>> "J" == Lux, Jim (337K) <james.p.lux at jpl.nasa.gov> writes:

    J> The reason I hadn't looked at "diskless boot from a
    J> server" is the size of the image - assume you don't have a high
    J> bandwidth or reliable link.

    R> This is not something to worry about with Qlustar. A (compressed)
    R> Qlustar 10.0 image containing e.g. the core OS + slurm + OFED +
    R> Lustre is just a mere 165MB to be transferred (eating 420MB of
    R> RAM when unpacked as the OS on the node) from the head to a
    R> node. Qlustar (and its non-public ancestors) were never using
    R> anything but RAMDisks (with real disks for scratch), the first
    R> cluster running this at the end of 2001 was on Athlons ... and
    R> eaten-up RAM in the range of 100MB still mattered a lot at that
    R> time :)

    R> So over the years, we perfected our image build mechanism to
    R> achieve a close to minimal (size-wise) OS, minimal in the sense
    R> of: Given required functionality (wanted kernel modules,
    R> services, binaries/scripts, libs), generate an image (module) of
    R> minimal size providing it. That is maximum light-weight by
    R> definition.

    R> Yes, I know, you'll probably say "well, but it's just Ubuntu
    R> ...". Not for much longer though: CentOS support (incl. OpenHPC
    R> integration) coming very soon ... And all Open-Source and free.

    R> Best,

    R> Roland

    R> ------- https://www.q-leap.com / https://qlustar.com
    R>           --- HPC / Storage / Cloud Linux Cluster OS ---