Thanks for the tip. I was looking at the all the options and FreeBSD/Xen looks like the best bet as far as resource throttling goes.
Install ROCKS on the nodes, install Xen on ROCKS, install FreeBSD as domU and give it domU a lot of priority. I'll give it a shot and publish my findings in the future. But of course, to keep it relevant, OpenBSD will run on the router and will use hoststated http://home.nuug.no/~peter/riga2008/relayd.html. I guess it's been renamed. I haven't paid attention. The book of PF uses hoststated, so I guess it's already kind of obsolete. Thanks, Vivek On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 10:17 PM, James Peltier <james_a_pelt...@yahoo.ca> wrote: > > --- On Thu, 5/7/09, Vivek Ayer <vivek.a...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> From: Vivek Ayer <vivek.a...@gmail.com> >> Subject: Recommendation for Beowulf/Apache Setup >> To: "misc" <misc@openbsd.org> >> Received: Thursday, May 7, 2009, 12:36 PM >> Hey guys, >> >> This is a very general question, but I'm sure not exactly >> sure how to >> proceed. I'll be getting a lot of hardware soon to be >> clustered and I >> was wondering what was your take on the setup. >> >> My setup was going to be: >> >> 1 OpenBSD Router running 4.5 routing to a subnet of 13 >> nodes running >> FreeBSD 7.2. Of the 13 nodes, 1 node is a master mysql >> server and the >> 12 nodes will run apache running LAMP-like services. The >> router will >> round-robin using hoststated for load-balancing. > > hoststated? What is that? I think you mean relayd! ;) > >> However, they will serve an additional task: The master >> mysql server >> will be head node for MPI jobs delivered to the 12 nodes. >> Basically, >> this setup will double up as a beowulf and web server. Is >> this >> efficient? I imagine the MPI jobs won't be running all the >> time and >> while they're up, might as well do something. > > I think you are going to be heading for a world of hurt here. I am the HPC director at a university supporting 3 faculties. Once people begin to use the resource the *will* crash nodes. Having any critical services running on HPC compute nodes is *not advisable*. > >> Firstly, would you recommend BSD or Linux for this. The >> router is a >> given to have OpenBSD of course, but what about the >> others? > > OS doesn't matter! It's all about the tools. We use GNU/Linux (CentOS 5) for our HPC cluster because there are more tools available natively for it. This is an unfortunate fact. More and more applications out there are becoming GNU/Linux specific and just don't work properly or at all on other OSs. Evaluate your tools and make a decision. AFAIK, Open-MPI, MPICH and MPICH2 compile and run fine on the BSDs. Other tools and libs, well, YMMV. > >> I figured it makes sense to parallelize as much as possible >> so that >> the HTTP/MPI load can be shared among as many computers as >> possible. >> Let me know your thoughts. > > Unless you have hard memory and CPU provisioning limiting what the cluster nodes can do, alah XEN/VMWare. Forget about it. Trust me. I've rebooted enough deadlocked/crash nodes due to user error to know better. If you have to... well... NO CARRIER... > > > __________________________________________________________________ > Be smarter than spam. See how smart SpamGuard is at giving junk email the boot with the All-new Yahoo! Mail. Click on Options in Mail and switch to New Mail today or register for free at http://mail.yahoo.ca
