Guy Tel-Zur's Blog

I tested the new HPC Europa Milestone 6 DVD and created a virtual cluster using VirtualBox on my laptop. I created a head-node and two computing nodes connected via a VLAN.  The head node has two network interfaces, NAT which enables the connection to the outside world and an internal virtual interface. The two computing nodes have only one network interface each for the VLAN. In picture number 1 the VirtualBox dashboard is shown with the 3 running computers Picture number 1: The VirtualBox dashboard showing the 3 running computers of the virtual cluster Picture number 2: The desktop of the head node (left) and the two computing nodes (right) In picture number two a PBS job executing a simple MPI task is demonstrated. The head node is on the left and the two computing nodes are on the right. My general impression is that this Virtual Cluster is an excellent tool for education where the teacher and later on the students can experience Parallel Processing using the...

In the RHEL documentation (Chapter 4. "Diskless Environments", item #4) there is an in-accuracy in the rsync syntax usage. Instead of: rsync -a -e ssh golden_client:/ /diskless/whatever/root/ Use the following syntax which does not produce error messages: rsync -v -a -e ssh --exclude='/sys/*' --exclude='/proc/*' golden_client:/ /diskless/whatever/root/ Other comments (that I find critial in my experience): 1) Make sure the following RPM is installed in the client: busybox-anaconda (In my CentOS4.4 case it is: busybox-anaconda-1.00.rc1-5.x86_64.rpm) 2) Make sure there are no active NFS mounted partitions on the client before executing 'rsync'. 3) Make sure that the following 2 directories exist: /tftpboot/linux-install/msgs/ /tftpboot/linux-install/pxelinux.cfg and that in the tftp definition file under /etc/xinted.d/tftp the following line is set correctly: server_args = -s /tftpboot/linux-install 4) If pxelinux.0 does not exist under /tftp...