|
Introduction
Motivation
Hardware
Software
Configuration
Installing
Linux
Progress
Projects
Notes
Background
|
The FAQ isn’t crystal clear on what you need to set up a Beowulf. Here’s
what I’ve gleaned so far.
Software I’m Using
It’s not that I’ve thoroughly tested an evaluated each of these packages
against their competitors.it’s just that these packages seemed to be the
most readily available and the fastest route to getting Beowoof up and
running.
- Linux on NuBus Macs
- Instructions for installing Linux
for Nubus Macs. Join the mailing
list.
- MPICH
- Argonne National Laboratory’s "freely available, portable implementation
of MPI, the Standard for message-passing libraries."
- OpenSSH
- "A FREE version of the SSH protocol suite of network connectivity
tools that increasing numbers of people on the Internet are coming to
rely on. Many users of telnet, rlogin, ftp, and other such programs
might not realize that their password is transmitted across the Internet
unencrypted, but it is. OpenSSH encrypts all traffic (including passwords)
to effectively eliminate eavesdropping, connection hijacking, and other
network-level attacks. Additionally, OpenSSH provides a myriad of secure
tunnelling capabilities, as well as a variety of authentication methods."
OpenSSH provides Beowoof a way to easily connect to its work nodes without
being interrogated for a password. It also provides a way for users
to securely connect to Beowoof.
- OpenSSL
- "A collaborative effort to develop a robust, commercial-grade,
full-featured, and Open Source toolkit implementing the Secure Sockets
Layer (SSL v2/v3) and Transport Layer Security (TLS v1) protocols as
well as a full-strength general purpose cryptography library."
OpenSSL provides cryptographic support for OpenSSH.
-
Software I’m Not Using
It’s not that this is in any way bad software. I’mjust not using
these packages.
MPI
- (Message Passing Interface) Software system that allows you to write
message-passing parallel programs that run on a cluster, in FORTRAN
and C. A de facto standard for portable message-passing parallel programs
standardized by the MPI Forum and available on all massively-parallel
supercomputers.
- LAM/MPI
- Local Area Multicomputer MPI, developed at the Ohio Supercomputer
Center and housed at Univ. of Notre Dame
- PVM
- (Parallel Virtual Machine) Software system that allows you to write
message-passing parallel programs that run on a cluster, in FORTRAN
and C. PVM used to be de facto standard until MPI appeared. But PVM
is still widely used and really good. There are a lot of PVM codes and
examples out there.
- SysV IPC
- lets tasks communicate with one another)
- channel-bonding patch to the Linux kernel
- lets you ’bond’ multiple Ethernet interfaces into a faster ’virtual’
Ethernet interface
- the global pid space patch for the Linux kernel
- lets you see all the processes on your Beowulf with ps, and maybe
kill etc. them
- DIPC
- lets you use sysv shared memory and semaphores and message queues
transparently across a cluster
- CMS
- Cluster Management System
- GNU CC/egcs
- (free FORTRAN-77, C, Pascal, and C++ compilers) Once compiled and
installed, the egcs compilers should reside in /usr/local. In this way
users can set their path to point to the appropriate versions (i.e.
standard gcc is in /usr/bin while egcs gcc is in /usr/local/bin)
|