rockscluster 5.2 announce Solaris Clients

Rocks v5.2 is released for Linux on the i386 and x86_64 CPU architectures and for Solaris on the x86_64 architecture
Rocks v5.2 is released for Linux on the i386 and x86_64 CPU architectures and Solaris for the x86_64 architecture.
1. Solaris support for client nodes

With the new JumpStart Roll, one can now install and configure a Linux-based Rocks frontend to JumpStart Solaris-based back-end machines.
2. Attributes

Can assign attributes to nodes at four levels: global, appliance type, OS (e.g., Linux or SunOS), and host. An attribute can be accessed in an XML node as an entity. For example, if you assign the attribute foo with the value 123? to compute-0-0 (i.e., with the command, rocks set host attr foo 123?), then in an XML node file, you can access the value of the attribute foo with &foo;.

There will be Sun HPC cluster tool 8.2 roll and SunStudio 12u1 roll.

Posted at 03:39PM Jun 26, 2009 by hstsao in ROCKS  |  Comments[0]

make frontend as sge_execd host

There is request from ROCKS user to make frontend as sge execd host Even through this is not the best practice, but I understand the desire from user that want to use all CPU for sge jobs. This note describe one possible way

• in frontend, login as root
• cd /opt/gridengine
./install_execd accept most default by hit return, except answer y to create local spool and supply /opt/gridengine/default/spool >
• By default sge will use all CPU for running jobs, for frontend one should reserve at least one CPU for the frontend's other functions and only use slots-1 for sge. If you have two cpu for frontend then one should change the slots for sge from 2 to 1.

  qconf -mattr queue slots 1 all.q@.local

Posted at 04:48PM May 25, 2006 by hstsao in ROCKS  | 

ROCKS vs OSCAR

ROCKS vs OSCAR

ROCKS and OSCAR are two most popular cluster installation tools, this weblog try to document the difference of the two tools.

ROCKS is an all inclusive linux HPC cluster tools that has the following features

• Simple installation: one use few CDs to install the ROCKS rolls and underline support OS's CD images
• it is based on the redhat kickstart and use xml file to descrip the configuration
• it stores the important information in mySQL database
• it use python as the main scripting tool
• it use Roll: rolls is rpms and xml files
• recommended rolls:area51 base ganglia hpc java kernel sge web-server os
• optional rolls: grid, IB,PBS, sce
• the latest relese 4.1 treat the underline CD as rolls
• it support redhat enterprise linux source based OS: centOS and RHEL4 and Sicentific Linux etc
• it include buildin tools: insert-ethers, cluster-forks,db report
• it include web based interface for mysql and ganglia
• it modifies the add_user so when one add user it will setup the SSH key such that one doesnot need to use passwd to execute commands

OSCAR is an source based tools that one need to configure and compile and install after the supported OS installations

• it support rhel3 and 4 x86 and x86_64, it support fc2, fc3, mandriva linux 10.0, 10.1 in x86 mode and CentOS, Scientific Linux
• it use Torque as default DRM but also include SGE recently
• it use systemImage to push the image to nodes use SISsuite and similar to Solaris Flash archive
• just like ROCK it use ganglia, support PVM and MPICP
• The main difference is Oscar is build on top an OS, e.g you instal OS first then OSCAR, in ROCKS you install ROCKS then OS
• Has GUI to install the Packages and select rpm for clinets
• include Cluster Command Control(C3)
• Include Switcher to support LAM/MPI
• can use HA-OSCAR to support HA frontend

Posted at 06:13PM Apr 15, 2006 by hstsao in ROCKS  | 

ROCKS 4.1 and RHEL4U2

ROCKS Cluster 4.1 and RHEL4U2

Recently we install the ROCKS Cluster SW 4.1 with RHEL4U2, we document some observations:

• during the frontend installation we need to put: frontend mem=1024M
• RHEL4U2 put pxelinux.0 in different rpm: in system-config-netboot instead of the syslinux and location /tftpboot/linux-install/pxelinux.0 so we need to copy pxelinux.0 to /tftpboot/pxelinux/

Posted at 08:35AM Nov 13, 2005 by hstsao in ROCKS  |  Comments[24]