[mpich-discuss] MPICH Hardware Configuration

[Jon Smejkal]

Hi Nicolás,

Thank you for your response. You have been very helpful and have 
provided some things to consider.

As for the documentation side, I was looking for a "hardware 
requirements" or "hardware best practices" kind of document. I agree 
that tackling the hardware side is a whole field unto itself and the 
MPICH2 team has better things to do. I guess I was looking for a jumping 
off point.

Thank you again for your input,
Jon



On 11/11/11 9:05 PM, Nicolas Rosner wrote:
> 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
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-- 
Jon Smejkal
Information Technology
Advanced Photon Source
Argonne National Laboratory
630.252.5616