[coreboot] LNXI eVelocity 2 BIOS reburn

ron minnich rminnich at gmail.com
Sat Sep 5 05:24:06 CEST 2009


On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 6:40 PM, Sebastian Lara<slara at udec.cl> wrote:

> Just because we start using ROCKS Clusters.  Are there some cluster
> distributions that can run without local disk on nodes?

Yes. I strongly suggest you take a look at this: http://onesis.org/

No local disks required. How big is your cluster? If less than 128
nodes, just run NFS root with one NFS root server. onesis is
incredibly clever, in that you can easily configure it to put each
nodes /tmp, /var, and so on in local ramfs or on a local disk.

We use it to run a 4400 node (not a typo) system at sandia: it scales.
We have many different types of installations, and it runs well one
even very small systems, like my Geode clusters.

And, it's very network oriented, but allows you to have data on local
disks. I'm really sold on it. One of our newer interns, Chris Kinney,
who is also on this list, can tell you more. He set up an 80-node
cluster, with no previous experience, in an afternoon.

I think if you went with onesis you could avoid having to refresh your
bios. Your life would be easier.

For compute node clusters, in fact, the best thing you can do is yank
the disks and throw them away -- unless you need them for local data
storage. They tend to cause trouble. I have not built a disk-based
cluster in 10 years, and I've built clusters that range in size from 4
nodes to 2048 nodes. Local disks are just trouble.

While I respect the work the Rocks guys have done, I think onesis is a
good way to go. So does Sun: they use onesis for their commercial
cluster offerings.

Thanks

ron




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