Easy Ubuntu Clustering

[robasc]

Hello everyone, My name is Rob and I am new to clustering and I am looking to find some people to chat with that can help me learn about clustering. Thanks to the help of ajt I am in the right place.

I have got a cluster put together using the idea from Joel Adams and their project Microwulf.

I thought this Idea would be a good way to start.

First off Let me just say that I am not an expert Linux guru but I do know the basics and I have been playing around for quite some time using various Linux OS systems; however, I am new to Ubuntu.

I am also very serious about getting this project done. I have already spent a good amount of money building this cluster and now I want to get it up and running.

One other thing I also liked the tutorial on kerrighed. I would be interested in learning more if anyone would care to help.

Thanks everyone!

[bigjimjams]

Hello everyone, My name is Rob and I am new to clustering and I am looking to find some people to chat with that can help me learn about clustering. Thanks to the help of ajt I am in the right place.

I have got a cluster put together using the idea from Joel Adams and their project Microwulf.

I thought this Idea would be a good way to start.

First off Let me just say that I am not an expert Linux guru but I do know the basics and I have been playing around for quite some time using various Linux OS systems; however, I am new to Ubuntu.

I am also very serious about getting this project done. I have already spent a good amount of money building this cluster and now I want to get it up and running.

One other thing I also liked the tutorial on kerrighed. I would be interested in learning more if anyone would care to help.

Thanks everyone!

Hi robasc, I'm happy to help (if I can). What sort of things do you need help with? It might be worth posting your questions on here.

[ajt]

[...]
I am also very serious about getting this project done. I have already spent a good amount of money building this cluster and now I want to get it up and running.

One other thing I also liked the tutorial on kerrighed. I would be interested in learning more if anyone would care to help.

Thanks everyone!

Hello, robasc.

Thanks for joining this thread

I'm interested in SSI (Single System Image). This is like SMP (Symmetric Multi Processing), but the interconnect between the CPU's spans different computer systems rather than just the memory bus or hyper transport used in multi CPU systems. In COTS (Commodity Off The Shelf) Beowulf clusters the interconnect is usually 100-BaseT or Gigabit ethernet.

In the recent past, three SSI projects were popular: OpenSSI, openMosix and Kerrighed. The OpenSSI project looks good, but seems to be dormant because the code releases are quite old, and the openMosix project is now closed down. That leaves Kerrighed, which is being actively developed by an enthusiastic team:

http://www.kerrighed.org

I run a 90-node openMosix Beowulf, which we are hoping to upgrade to Kerrighed as soon as we can get it to run long enough to use

There are other ways of using a cluster, but the idea of a 'type 2' Beowulf class machine is that it has a distributed process space and automatically balances the load on different nodes. Older 'type 1' Beowulf clusters use a DRM (Distributed Resource Manager) like SGE (Sun Grid Engine) to balance the load and schedule jobs. Both types of Beowulf are used to run MPI (Message Passing Interface) programs to split the load of a single job over multiple nodes in order to use the aggregate performance of the cluster. SSI is best for 'embarrasingly' parallel computation. A good starting point to learn is ClusterMonkey:

http://www.clustermonkey.net/

Bye,

Tony.

[robasc]

Thanks for the info ajt. I will be checking it out for sure.

Meanwhile, I have got something here that I need some of you to look over. I decided to go with a kerrighed setup using BigJimJams instructions; however, I was unsuccessful an getting the diskless nodes to boot up. I think you guys could probably help me to find my problems.

Ok, here is every thing wrapped up in a webpage that I have done from beginning to end which includes where I am with the project and what problems I am having. I know the page is lengthy, but I did not want to leave out anything on my setup.Please let me know what I am doing wrong and where I need to start.

Ok, here is the website to got to:

KerrighedCluster.htm

[ajt]

Thanks for the info ajt. I will be checking it out for sure.
[...]
Ok, here is every thing wrapped up in a webpage that I have done from beginning to end which includes where I am with the project and what problems I am having. I know the page is lengthy, but I did not want to leave out anything on my setup.Please let me know what I am doing wrong and where I need to start.

Ok, here is the website to got to:

KerrighedCluster.htm

Hello, robasc.

That's a bit of a long read!

The server 192.168.1.128 is excluded from your network:

192.168.1.128/25 = 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.128

The lowest address in this network is 192.168.1.129

Why do you not just use:

192.168.1.0/24 = 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0

Bye,

Tony.

[robasc]

I know it is a very long read but I did not want to leave anything out.

I changed the network to 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0 as you stated and now I get a PXE-E51 No DHCP or proxyDHCP offers were received.

I sure do appreciate everyone's help on this.

[robasc]

Well it seems to be booting up but I get this:

Done.

Gave up waiting for root device. Common problems:

-Boot args (cat /proc/cmdline)
-Check rootdelay= (did the system wait long enough?)
-Check root= (did the system wait for the right device?)
-Missing modules (cat /proc/modules; ls /dev)
ALERT! /dev/nfs does not exist. Dropping to a shell!


BusyBox v1.10.2 (Ubuntu 1:1.10.2-1ubuntu6) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

(intitramfs)_

Not really sure what this all means but I believe I am missing some files but not sure. That is my best guess.

I updated the bottom of the webpage with a screen capture if you care to look at it.

[bigjimjams]

Well it seems to be booting up but I get this:

Done.

Gave up waiting for root device. Common problems:

-Boot args (cat /proc/cmdline)
-Check rootdelay= (did the system wait long enough?)
-Check root= (did the system wait for the right device?)
-Missing modules (cat /proc/modules; ls /dev)
ALERT! /dev/nfs does not exist. Dropping to a shell!


BusyBox v1.10.2 (Ubuntu 1:1.10.2-1ubuntu6) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

(intitramfs)_

Not really sure what this all means but I believe I am missing some files but not sure. That is my best guess.

I updated the bottom of the webpage with a screen capture if you care to look at it.

Hi robasc, not sure if this would help but it seems that its booting the kernel from tftp fine but just not mounting the NFS. Have you tried editing /etc/network/interfaces on the server, and changing the ethernet card to manual, like you did with the nodes?

[bigjimjams]

Well it seems to be booting up but I get this:

Done.

Gave up waiting for root device. Common problems:

-Boot args (cat /proc/cmdline)
-Check rootdelay= (did the system wait long enough?)
-Check root= (did the system wait for the right device?)
-Missing modules (cat /proc/modules; ls /dev)
ALERT! /dev/nfs does not exist. Dropping to a shell!


BusyBox v1.10.2 (Ubuntu 1:1.10.2-1ubuntu6) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

(intitramfs)_

Not really sure what this all means but I believe I am missing some files but not sure. That is my best guess.

I updated the bottom of the webpage with a screen capture if you care to look at it.

Hi robasc, just had another thought. When you updated the subnet mask from 255.255.255.128 to 255.255.255.0 in the DHCP server config file, did you also update the /etc/exports for the nfs server, as I've just noticed on your webpage it was still using 255.255.255.128, which might explain why the NFS isn't mounting.

[bigjimjams]

Hi BigJimJams,

Thanks for the great guide!

I did notice a few problems with the guide however...:

- The guide doesn't show how to set up /etc/network/interfaces on the server

- In /etc/default/dhcp3-server your missing a semi-colon at the end of the third to last line

- In /etc/default/tftpd-hpa RUN_DAEMON should equal "yes" (all lowercase), mine was yelling at me without this (I was using debian so maybe that's why).


Just as a side note, I was having trouble at the tftp stage. DHCP assigned an IP address ok, but I recieved the "PXE-E32" error. This only happened on two of the three computers I was using.
So as this source (http://www.mail-archive.com/ltsp-dis.../msg32044.html) suggests I tried booting from a pxe cd. I used GPXE.
I went to their website (http://kernel.org/pub/software/utils/boot/gpxe/) and downloaded the latest version. Then I untarred it (tar -xzf gpxe-*), then I changed directories into the new folder (cd gpxe-*).
Then I changed directory into src (cd src) then ran "make bin/gpxe.iso" Then the iso was in "bin/gpxe.iso". I was able to boot from this which resolved the problem.

Hi Jedi453, thanks for the feedback, from what I remember the only change I made to the /etc/network/interface file on the server (which should have been in the guide) was to edit the configuration for eth0 from auto to manual. The IP address and subnet mask were then assigned manually, as mentioned in the guide. Question2 has been updated in the guide. Thanks for spotting that, there was bound to have been a typo in there somewhere! I think point 3 is a distribution thing, as I've used capitals (if I remember correctly, it was written like this when the file was automatically created) and it works fine.