Someone should remaster a Beowulf Knoppix

[arkaine23]

I've got an application in mind, although its still being worked on at Stanford University (protein folding with gromacs). It'd be great if a Knoppix remaster could use PXE for booting the nodes (from a HDD install), or even if the nodes just booted from CD....

Anyone know what would be involved in such a project? I have a couple of ppl who are ready to get started.

[UnderScore]

Could parallelknoppix be what you are looking for? http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15101
From http://pareto.uab.es/mcreel/ParallelKnoppix/
ParallelKnoppix is a remaster of Knoppix that allows setting up a cluster of machines for parallel processing using the LAM-MPI and/or MPICH implementations of MPI. Getting the cluster up and running takes less than 15 minutes, if the machines have PXE network cards.

[arkaine23]

I've looked at parallel knoppix, but I wasn't quite sure if it was what I'm looking for . They do not use the term "beowulf" anywhere, and beowulf is what would be required for the cluster client of folding@home.

[UnderScore]

I have been out of the clustering sphere of knowledge for a couple years but I believe you are getting mixed up in the terminology. A beowulf is just name or classification of a parallel processing high performance computing cluster based on low cost common off the shelf PCs. Unless I am gravely mistaken, parallelknoppix provides the PXE network booting for the nodes and also the parallel computing libraries.

As for understanding beowulf or HPC you can go to the source "Engineering a Beowulf-style Compute Cluster" http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Beowulf/beowulf_book/beowulf_book/node9.html. You can also see my presentation of a Beowulf cluster that used PVM for my SysAdmin2 class at http://www.virtualacuity.com/james/cluster/index.html.

I hope this helps.
James