Another Install Day
by Alex on Jul.19, 2009, under Purdue
It appears our last cluster was such a hit that once again my department at Purdue is going to do a single day, multi-hundred node cluster installation. Last year, the work went very quickly and we had the cluster racked before lunch. This year, we asked for fewer volunteers and added an extra step in the process, installing 10GigE network adapters. Hopefully that will slow things down enough so the VIPs can actually see us working.
As always, the marketing folks put together a short little clip to push the day:
The racking and stacking is pretty much just a matter of man power. Getting the software onto the systems is done using RHEL’s Anaconda and several scripts. All the magic was described by some of my coworkers in a paper for the USENIX’s LISA 2008 Conference.. A copy can be found here. It’s pretty fun stuff.
