A General Purpose High Performance Linux Installation Infrastructure | Zendy

Alf Wachsmann | Zendy

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A General Purpose High Performance Linux Installation Infrastructure

Author(s) -

Alf Wachsmann

Publication year - 2002

Publication title -

osti oai (u.s. department of energy office of scientific and technical information)

Language(s) - English

Resource type - Reports

DOI - 10.2172/799076

Subject(s) - operating system , installation , dynamic host configuration protocol , computer science , booting , usable , minimalism (technical communication) , gnu/linux , computer cluster , server , linux unified key setup , software , node (physics) , cluster (spacecraft) , embedded system , ip address , computer network , linux kernel , engineering , world wide web , structural engineering , human–computer interaction

With more and more and larger and larger Linux clusters, the question arises how to install them. This paper addresses this question by proposing a solution using only standard software components. This installation infrastructure scales well for a large number of nodes. It is also usable for installing desktop machines or diskless Linux clients, thus, is not designed for cluster installations in particular but is, nevertheless, highly performant. The infrastructure proposed uses PXE as the network boot component on the nodes. It uses DHCP and TFTP servers to get IP addresses and a bootloader to all nodes. It then uses kickstart to install Red Hat Linux over NFS. We have implemented this installation infrastructure at SLAC with our given server hardware and installed a 256 node cluster in 30 minutes. This paper presents the measurements from this installation and discusses the bottlenecks in our installation.

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