Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2002 09:59:56 -0800 (PST) From: Matt Wilbur <matt@efs.org> To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: diskless freebsd cluster Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0202070937520.4970-100000@sargon.photon.com>
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Hi all, I just wanted to say, to the entire FreeBSD team, especially everyone involved with pxe support, rc.diskless[1,2], mfs, and gigabit nic support, THANKS! You ROCK! I just got a 16 node diskless cluster of 1.4GHz Athlons (dual 1GHz p3 server) up and running 4.5-RELEASE, and it was SO much easier than it used to be.. The cluster has two "primary" uses, one is to do high volume number crunching, the other is for a parallelized port of one of our toolkits for a particular customer, who is insisting on a Scyld Linux "beowulf". The original plan was to port our crunching codes from FreeBSD to Linux (sigh), but since it took about a day to build a second system disk running FreeBSD (and a port would've taken at least a week or two), that is far more cost effective in the short. Hopefully I can build a mini scyld cluster for development only and we can stick with FreeBSD.. Why diskless? We're doing diskless because the codes we're currently using are CPU intensive, with little file i/o, and because the lab it's operating in has restricted access, its far easier to operate diskless for media accounting reasons, especially if/when N goes from 16 to say, 64..or if we want to wheel the rack out of the lab and operate "outside". I'm getting 97% user CPU on all nodes when I hammer the system with runs, I can live with that.. The network is 100baseT to the client nodes, 1000baseSX server->switch. For what it's worth, the crunching used to happen on Origin 200s. Of two primary codes we run, code A would take about the same time on freebsd on a p3-1GHz as it did on a 270MHz r12000. Code B ran three times faster on a p3-1GHz than on the 270MHz r12k. Our cost savings are phenomenal using commodity hardware and a great OS. If anyone would find the setup/configuration of interest I can document how I set it up and throw it up somewhere for your perusal.. again, THANK YOU! Matt Wilbur To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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