[Beowulf] USB flash drive bootable distro to check cluster health.

[John Hearns]

I stand by what Joe says. Good advice.

When at Viglen XMA we had a similar system for field testing and burnin.
However we did not use a USB bootable system.
We would take a complete head node on site when I first joined the company,
using Rocks Linux.
I am no far of Rocks I'm afraid - sorry Rocks guys but it just got under my
skin.

In later days we got some small form factor HP systems and I used an
OpenHPC install on them.
If you get a small form factor system with a PCI Express slot this can use
a 10Gbps or an Infiniband card so you have the correct network to PXE over.

So I would look at a portable small form factor system, using OpenHPC or
the utilities with Joe suggests.














On Fri, 11 Jan 2019 at 16:07, Joe Landman <joe.landman at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On 1/11/19 7:59 AM, Richard Chang wrote:
> > Hi,
> > I would like to know if we have or can make( or prepare) a USB
> > bootable OS that we can boot in a cluster and its nodes to test all
> > its functionality.
> >
> > The purpose of this is to boot a new or existing cluster to check its
> > health, including Infiniband network,  any cards, local hard disks,
> > memory etc, so that I don't have to disturb the existing OS and its
> > configuration.
> >
> > If possible, it would be nice to boot the compute nodes from the
> > master node.
> >
> > Anyone knows of any pre-existing distribution that will do the job ?
> > Or know how to do it with Centos or Ubuntu ?
>
> FWIW: this is one of the uses cases of
> https://github.com/joelandman/nyble .  It works with CentOS, Debian, and
> Ubuntu (though I've not pushed the 18.04.1 changes yet).
>
> I have a rudimentary USB target I was going to clean up soon, and the
> images can be centrally booted from a pxe server, and pull/run scripts
> post boot.
>
> Runs in RAM, you can modify the distributions to your hearts content.  I
> have a few private repos here which have NVidia + MLNX + other drivers
> and related bits already built in.
>
> I've set up many systems with this, tying it together with
> https://github.com/joelandman/tiburon for boot control.   This was
> originally used at Scalable Informatics when we were alive, and has
> evolved significantly since then.
>
> If you want a simple pure USB distro for this, try SystemRescueCD,
> though I don't think it does Infiniband, or most drivers.
>
>
> --
>
> Joe Landman
> e: joe.landman at gmail.com
> t: @hpcjoe
> w: https://scalability.org
> g: https://github.com/joelandman
> l: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelandman
>
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