GeekForce

I dropped a PC on my toe yesterday. I have been rooting through all my carcasses of computers, looking for more and better RAM for the cluster nodes. A pc slipped out of my hands while I was lifting it…

So far, I have 512MB in the master node. Once I found that much, I tried to install rocksclusters again. No dice. ROCKS really looks like the best set of tools for my purposes. I’m going to have to try to get it to install on small machines like the ones that I have.

So I guess at this point, I have two threads at work here.

1) Get ROCKS running on the network with the limited resources that I have.

2) Install and configure Debian DCC.

I guess I should outline the benefits of each of these.

DCC Debian Clustering

• Seems to be better suited to my environment. It runs on smaller machines, so it is simple to get it going.
• includes a small suite of command line tools for doing things like introducing new nodes on to the cluster, even including recompiling the boot image, when you add new software to it.

ROCKS Redhat Clustering

• Is a very complete solution, encompassing nearly every component that a cluster user and administrator could dream of, in simple ready to install packages.
• has a complete suite of command line tools for management of the cluster, the boot image, node performance, etc.
• installation in the form of a single boot CD, and several supporting CD’s for extra packages.

At any rate, I’m continuing to setup and configure using DCC right now. I’m having problems, because the Debian that i’m using is too new for the support libraries that are needed by DCC, forcing me to go and install things like libreadline4. The biggest problem that I’m having is that DCC wants a package called mpich installed. But there is no package called that. mpich consists of a number of packages, mpich-bin, etc. I’m assuming that if there was a meta-package called mpich that would solve the problem, but i cant find one.

This seems like alot of hassle. But compared to trying to get install, this seemed like the easiest way.

Anybody know different?