Good tutorial on setting up a grid/cluster using fedora

[Veli-Pekka Kestilä]

On 3.4.2014 23:41, Adrian Sevcenco wrote:
> On 04/02/2014 09:54 PM, Bill Oliver wrote:
>> Just to see if I can do it, I thought I'd set up a small grid/cluster
>> using fedora.  Does anybody know of a good step-by-step guide for this
>> (preferably free and online :-) )?
> As for the answer to your initial inquiry i would highly recommend ROCKS
> Clusters that is based on CENTOS. it will automatically install and
> manage your nodes from a single point (the FrontEnd server)(with NFS
> shared home).
>
I have tried ROCKS before (granted it was maybe 6 years ago) and it 
seems good if you have very lage number of nodes. If not then I would 
recommend setting the things yourself. Most programs run in scientific 
clusters use MPI for shared communication so you will just need MPI 
setup I would not waste time job management and such as long as there is 
only one person running on the cluster.

Setting up maybe 10 to 20 machines with kickstart using fedora with 
openmpi, ssh-keys for easy access to nodes and nfs sharing form frontend 
shouldn't be that big job. You will take same amount time learning ROCKS 
and it will have lots of features you don't need.

Also if you don't use the machines all the time and don't have the 
hardware yet it might be beneficial to use AWS nodes to do the 
calculations. In big HPC setups the real cost of the cluster usually 
comes from electricity consumption and cooling so you should factor 
these costs in when deciding what to do.

-vpk