[Beowulf] PXE boot with X7DWT-INF IB onboard card

[Duke Nguyen]

Hi folks,

We are still on the way of building our first small-cluster. Right now 
we have 16 diskless nodes 8GB RAM on X7DWT-INF and a master also on 
X7DWT-INF with 120GB disk and 16GB RAM. These boards (X7DWT-INF) has 
built-in Infiniband Card (Infiniband MT25204 20Gbps Controller), and I 
hoped that we can create a boot server on the master node for the 16 
clients using IB connection.

Unfortunately after reading, I found out that our built-card is too old 
for Mellanox FlexBoot:

$ lspci -v | grep Mellanox
08:00.0 InfiniBand: Mellanox Technologies MT25204 [InfiniHost III Lx 
HCA] (rev 20)
     Subsystem: Mellanox Technologies MT25204 [InfiniHost III Lx HCA]

whereas FlexBoot requires at least Connect2X-3X to work with.

My questions are:

  * any body using the same (or similar main boards) and was able to 
boot using PXE?
  * if PXE server with Infiniband is impossible, then it is OK with a 
gigabyte connection? Or should we go for 16 disks for these 16 clients 
and dont care much on boot over IB or IP? (more money, of course)

Thanks,

D.