Re: news from the Debian Beowulf project?

Greetings,

On Sun, 2007-04-15 at 09:35 +0200, karel lang wrote:
> hello,
> i'd like to ask, if there are some howto's or materials like that of 
> newer date about installing and maintaining the Beowulf project on 
> Debian Linux.

As far as I know, the most current Debian-specific howtos are on the
Debian Wiki: start at http://wiki.debian.org/?DebianBeowulf .  There are
many Debian-specific enhancements such as update-cluster, FAI, dsh, etc.
which make facilitate cluster management on Debian.  There is of course
still room for improvement, e.g. generating dhcp server config files
using update-cluster (bug 156810); ideas and patches are always welcome.

Unfortunately, since the Beowulf Wiki pages were written (mostly by
yours truly), the diskless package has been orphaned, so that section is
valid through sarge but not for etch.  Would someone be interested in
redoing that section for lessdisks -- or in re-introducing diskless?
(Though the latter will not help with etch.)

Another suggestion for Wiki improvement: discuss OpenMPI (comparing with
MPICH and PVM, including its new features: MPI-2, fault tolerance, etc.

> I'd have use (perhaps) for such system for a car crashtest sw, but so 
> far what i found is howtos and news of older date.

Great, so you're probably using LS-DYNA?  I believe it uses MPI, and
should run just fine on Debian with mpich or openmpi across a cluster.

> Anyone here, who could point me in some direction? Perhaps it can seem i 
> ask about stupid thing, but free time is so scarce ... :()

Not a stupid thing at all, that's what this list is for. :-)  Please try
things, report your findings to the list, and suggest improvements, so
we can all learn from your experience and make Debian Beowulf tools and
documentation even more powerful and easy to use.

Cheers,
-Adam
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