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

[Jörg Saßmannshausen]

Hi,

why USB? Why not PXE boot?

Back at the old workplace I had a PXE boot image installed on the headnode 
which I used to install the new compute node and did debugging or testing. 
If you don't want to install anything on the cluster: put that image on a USB 
stick, boot it on the headnode and then boot the compute nodes. So everything 
should run of the USB stick (headnode) and via the network (compute nodes in 
PXE boot).

Depending on the cluster size I guess there are limits of how many compute 
nodes you could run simultaneously. 

Just an idea.

All the best from a dark London

Jörg


Am Freitag, 11. Januar 2019, 18:29:28 GMT schrieb Richard Chang:
> 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 ?
> 
> Thanks,
> Richard.
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