[mpich-discuss] MPICH Hardware Configuration

[Nicolas Rosner]

Hello Jon,

> Can I just plug them all into the same network switch
> and access them from a desktop user machine?

Short answer: Yes.

Longer answer (sorry if somewhat off-topic):

I know near-zero about your more specific requirements, e.g. how
exactly you need to access the minis, whether the desktop machine
would be on the same subnet, whether it'd be a Mac, what OS version,
etc. Such details could actually matter if you want to rely on the
'ultra-user-friendly' side of the OS X Srvr admin tools, which AFAIK
can be quite picky about, say, your desktop OS X machine being exactly
the same animal-version-number as your servers and whatnot.

[ --> http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1822 ]

OTOH, if a slightly less streamlined "admin experience" (ha) doesn't
scare you too much, then you should be just fine. It is a server
platform, after all, so running headless is what it's designed for.
Since both ssh and vnc daemons are bundled, even your worst-case
scenario still would include quite decent platform-agnostic remote
access. I hope this answers your question.


> or will I have to use one of them as a head node?
> Can you point me in the right direction?

Depends on what you mean by 'head node' here. No, you don't need to
sacrifice a compute node unless you want to. Any other 10.7 Mac should
probably work for the Apple-blessed paradigm. And any old PC with a
vnc and a ssh client would, at the very least, get you graphics and
text-based access with little or no effort.

But yes, you probably will want to configure a 'headless head node'
(no monitor, still usable for HPC, just a slightly different config)
in the sense of an entry point to the cluster LAN. Otherwise you'd
have to either expose every node or none at all to the outside world
(be that the internet, the rest of your office or whatever).


> documentation and support pages but see no
> reference on how to tackle the hardware end

I'm not related to the MPICH2 team, but an end user from South
America, so this is merely a personal opinion on this -- but I'm not
sure I got it -- were you thinking of something akin to a "How to set
up a network" chapter on the user guide?

If so, I'd have to disagree. I think there are many good sources for
that kind of thing on the Web. I'd rather see the MPICH2 people keep
up their good work at developing and supporting MPICH2 itself, rather
than losing focus on the prerequisites. Sorry if you meant something
else and I misunderstood!

Good luck, hth,

Nicolás