How to install beowulf

To do this, add the nodes to the hosts file of all nodes [ubuntuwiki] , [linuxcom]. All nodes should have a static local IP address set. For this tutorial I assume that all nodes are already properly configured to have a static local IP address. Try this with different nodes on different nodes. You should get a response similar to the above. In this tutorial, master is used as the master node.

Once the cluster has been set up, the master node will be used to start jobs on the cluster. The master node will be used to spawn jobs on the cluster. The compute nodes are node1 to node3 and will thus execute the jobs. Several tutorials explain that all nodes need a separate user for running MPI jobs [ubuntuwiki] , [linuxcom] , [wong]. Passwordless login with the use of authorized keys only works if the username matches the one set for passwordless login.

The command below creates a new user with username "mpiuser" and user ID Giving a user ID below prevents the user from showing up in the login screen for desktop versions of Ubuntu. Create the user like this,. Enter a password for the user when prompted. This is the home directory for user mpiuser and we will use it to execute jobs on the cluster. Files and programs used for MPI jobs jobs that are run in parallel on the cluster need to be available to all nodes, so we give all nodes access to a part of the file system on the master node.

Network File System NFS enables you to mount part of a remote file system so you can access it as if it is a local directory. To install NFS, run the following command on the master node:. And in order to make it possible to mount a Network File System on the compute nodes, the nfs-common package needs to be installed on all compute nodes:.

But since we created this home directory with the adduser command earlier, it is already owned by the MPI user,. Add the following line to this file,. You can read the man page to learn more about the exports file man exports. After the first install you may need to restart the NFS daemon:.

In order to test this, you can run the following command from a compute node:. All data files and programs that will be used for running an MPI job must be placed in this directory on the master node.

The other nodes will then be able to access these files through NFS. The firewall is by default enabled on Ubuntu. The firewall will block access when a client tries to access an NFS shared directory. So you need to add a rule with UFW a tool for managing the firewall to allow access from a specific subnet. If the IP addresses in your network have the format Run the following command to allow incoming access from a specific subnet,.

You need to run this on the master node and replace " Run the following commands to test this,. If this fails or hangs, restart the compute node and try again.

Add the following line to the fstab file of all compute nodes,. Again, read the man page of fstab if you want to know the details man fstab. It might take some time for the system to initialize the connection with the master node. For the cluster to work, the master node needs to be able to communicate with the compute nodes, and vice versa [ubuntuwiki].

Secure Shell SSH is usually used for secure remote access between computers. By setting up passwordless SSH between the nodes, the master node is able to run commands on the compute nodes. This is needed to run the MPI daemons on the available compute nodes.

When done, all nodes should have an SSH key the same key actually. The master node needs to be able to automatically login to the compute nodes. There is a command to push the public SSH key of the currently logged in user to another computer. Run the following commands on the master node as user "mpiuser",. This means that we should now be able to login on the compute nodes from the master node without having to enter a password,. You should now be logged in on node1 via SSH.

The process manager is needed to spawn and manage parallel jobs on the cluster. With the help of VMware , I am going to show you, step-by-step, the process of creating your own Linux Beowulf cluster. Once you see how easy it is, you might just be ready to implement this powerful workhorse in your organization. Got cluster? Need more information on Linux clustering? Each node is also configured on its own private network that utilizes network address translation NAT to get to the outside world through my Windows XP machine.

For a larger production, MB of memory is recommended. The operating system For these installations, I have chosen a minimal Linux installation. I am using Red Hat Linux 7. Each installation is identical to all of the others. I installed the first machine into its VMware partition and then copied and renamed it for the second and third virtual machines. In the real world, using a tool such as Ghost or rsync would be the preferred method for creating identical nodes.

Also, for any file edits, feel free to use your favorite text editor. Mine happens to be Pico, so that is what I used for this example. Security Because this cluster is not attached to the outside world, I did not install a firewall. If you set up your own cluster, be sure to address these two issues to provide a reasonable level of security. The clustering software To begin, I had to make sure that the rsh and the telnet servers were installed.

One way to see if the daemons are running is to run the setup program by running the command setup , choose System Services from the menu, and see if the daemons appear on the list. If they do not, they can be installed from CD1 of the Red Hat distribution. If you are not using Red Hat 7.

Note that the telnet server also requires xinetd. To install xinetd , type rpm —i xinetd Gentlemen…start your connection services! Once I knew that the rlogin , rsh, and telnet services were installed, I needed to make sure that they were enabled, via xinetd, to start.

Cloud computing with VPS instances provides a number of possibilities not readily available to home computer users. One of these is the concept of clustering. With easily deployable server instances, clustered computing is easy to set up and expand. In this guide, we will discuss how to configure a Beowulf cluster for distributed processing between nodes. In this tutorial, we will be using 4 Ubuntu The majority of the configuration will be the same throughout the nodes, so we will use a bootstrap process to set up an initial environment, then leverage DigitalOcean snapshots to deploy this to the other nodes.

This configuration will also take advantage of DigitalOcean Private Networking, which currently is available in the NYC2 region currently. Be sure to enable private networking when creating your droplet. We will be using 4 GB droplets in order to take advantage of the higher processing power, but you can use smaller nodes.

The rest of the nodes should not be created initially. At this point, you should have your control droplet created with an Ubuntu You should create a user and give it sudo privileges. We will use this user for this tutorial. The first thing that we will do is create an additional, unprivileged user to operate our cluster this should be separate from the user you use with sudo. We will name our user cluster :. The --uid parameter specifies the user id that will be associated with the account.

A number below indicates a system user that should not be used for regular tasks. Next, we need to create SSH credentials for our user. We will need to set up an SSH key pair so that all of the nodes can communicate without the use of passwords. First, change users to the new cluster user. Supply the password you set during creation:.

We now can copy it to our own known hosts file. This allows parallel processes to communicate easily and share work and status information. We will create our worker nodes by creating a snapshot of our current control node configuration and then diverging from that point.

To create a snapshot, begin by powering down your droplet. In the command line, type:. In the DigitalOcean control panel, select your control node droplet. When your snapshot is complete, you can use the snapshot image as the base for your worker nodes. We will be creating 3 additional nodes, called work1 , work2 , and work3. Select the name, droplet size you would like, and select a region with Private Networking NYC2 for example.

The easiest way of doing this is through the DigitalOcean control panel. Click on the droplet name. Write down the Private IP address and the associated host name of each node. You will need this information momentarily. We now need to complete the control node configuration.

Up until now, we were doing generic configuration so that our changes would be applicable to our worker nodes.