[Beowulf] SATA II - PXE+NFS - diskless compute nodes

[Eric Shook]

Thanks for the links Bill.  I will check them out.  Before I try it, how 
likely would it work for a system other than yours? :O)

Bill Bryce wrote:
> It works but honestly I can't say it is 'production'.  If you are
> interested in the 'roll' it is located at:
> 
>  http://www.osgdc.org/project/kusu/wiki/RocksRoll
> 
> We tried it with Rocks 4.1 (not Rocks 4.2) and Platform OCS
> (http://my.platform.com/products/platform-ocs)
> 
> The roll takes the existing rocks repository on the frontend and builds
> a vnfs image out of it for the compute nodes.  It also turns off the
> standard rocks DHCP and PXE changes and replaces them with warewulf...it
> isn't pretty but it does work.  
> 
> Regards, 
> 
> Bill.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Eric Shook [mailto:eric-shook at uiowa.edu] 
> Sent: Tuesday, December 12, 2006 12:28 PM
> To: Bill Bryce
> Cc: Michael Will; Buccaneer for Hire.; beowulf at beowulf.org
> Subject: Re: [Beowulf] SATA II - PXE+NFS - diskless compute nodes
> 
> Hi Bill,
> 
> I will try to email them and let everyone know what they have to say.
> 
> How did the Rocks -> warewulf conversion go?
> 
> Thanks,
> Eric
> 
> Bill Bryce wrote:
>> Hi Eric,
>>
>> You may want to send the Perceus guys an email and ask them how hard
> it
>> is to replace cAos Linux with RHEL or CentOS.  I don't believe it
> should
>> be that hard for them to do....we modified Warewulf to install on top
> of
>> a stock Rocks cluster effectively turning a Rocks cluster into a
>> Warewulf cluster - and the cluster was running RHEL....so it is
>> possible.
>>
>> Regards, 
>>
>> Bill.
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org]
>> On Behalf Of Michael Will
>> Sent: Monday, December 11, 2006 7:15 PM
>> To: Eric Shook; Buccaneer for Hire.
>> Cc: beowulf at beowulf.org
>> Subject: RE: [Beowulf] SATA II - PXE+NFS - diskless compute nodes
>>
>> Scyld CW4 is based on RHEL4 and also supported on Centos 4. That does
>> not give you different
>> operating systems though, just flexible deployment of RHEL4 based HPC
>> compute nodes. 
>>
>> Note that we had to reimplement the PXE boot part to allow reasonable
>> scaling. 
>>
>> Michael
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org]
>> On Behalf Of Eric Shook
>> Sent: Saturday, December 09, 2006 11:28 AM
>> To: Buccaneer for Hire.
>> Cc: beowulf at beowulf.org
>> Subject: Re: [Beowulf] SATA II - PXE+NFS - diskless compute nodes
>>
>> Not to diverge this conversation, but has anyone had any experience
>> using this pxe boot / nfs model with a rhel variant?  I have been
>> wanting to do a nfs root or ramdisk model for some-time but our
> software
>> stack requires a rhel base so Scyld and Perceus most likely will not
>> work (although I am still looking into both of them to make sure)
>>
>> Thanks for any help,
>> Eric Shook
>>
>> Buccaneer for Hire. wrote:
>>> [snip]
>>>
>>>   
>>>> I agree with what Joe says about a few hundred nodes being the time 
>>>> you would start to look closer at this approach.
>>>>     
>>> I have started to explore the possibility of using this technology
>> because I would really like to see us with the ability to change OSs
> and
>> OS Personalities as needed.  The question I have is with 2000+ compute
>> nodes what kind of infrastructure do I need to support this?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>  
>>>
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-- 
Eric Shook (319) 335-6714
Technical Lead, Systems and Operations - GROW
http://grow.uiowa.edu