Beowulf Installation and Administration HOWTO

Jacek Radajewski and Douglas Eadline

1. Preamble

• 1.1 Disclaimer
• 1.2 Copyright
• 1.3 About this HOWTO
• 1.4 About the authors
• 1.5 Acknowledgements

2. Introduction

3. Quick Start (disk-less clients).

• 3.1 Setup and configure hardware.
• 3.2 Install OS.
• 3.3 Configure Disk-less Clients.
• 3.4 Create Disk-less client boot floppies.
• 3.5 Create File Systems for the Clients.

4. Designing The Cluster

• 4.1 Disk
• 4.2 Memory
• 4.3 CPU
• 4.4 Network
• 4.5 Which Distribution ?
• 4.6 Buying Hardware

5. Installing Master Server

• 5.1 Partition sizes
• 5.2 Installing Red Hat Linux
• 5.3 Network configuration
• 5.4 Setting up DNS
• 5.5 /etc/hosts
• 5.6 /etc/resolv.conf
• 5.7 /etc/hosts.equiv
• 5.8 Sample .cshrc
• 5.9 Clock Synchonozation

6. Setting up clients

• 6.1 Cloning clients
• 6.2 Configuring disk-less clients
• 6.3 How to access clients' consoles ?
• 6.4 Installing the operating system on each client separately.

7. Compilers

8. Communication Software

• 8.1 PVM versus MPI
• 8.2 MPI
• 8.3 To see if the daemons are running:
• 8.4 PVM

9. Conversion Software

10. System Monitoring Software

• 10.1 bWatch
• 10.2 Using httpd and CGI scripts.
• 10.3 Netpipe
• 10.4 Network performance: netperf
• 10.5 Parallel Performance: NASA parallel Benchmarks
• 10.6 CMS

11. Security

• 11.1 Server
• 11.2 Clients

12. Ethernet Channel Bonding:

13. Configuring switches:

14. References and Other Sources of Information

15. sdct script

16. adcn script

17. firewall script

18. Changes (started in version 0.1.0)