updated parallelknoppix

[UnderScore]

Would you mind very much if I used in class? I was going to make some sort of powerpoint presentation on this, but you stole the cake!

Thanks for the kind words. Sure!, you can use it. You can either download all the slides or if you need it I can zip up the whole directory for you. I went through my old college homework files & was able to find the original PowerPoint PPT file and saved it as a OpenOffice.org file. This file will be different from the online slides because I had updated the online slides in WordPerfect Office and I can't find that file. I do have the original 2 xpvm session screenshots and the original stairway to heaven PNG. You can find them at http://www.virtualacuity.com/james/c...sources.tar.gz. I even included the command line history file. At about line 690 you should see how I initiated the parallel POV render job.
I hope this helps.
James

[A. Jorge Garcia]

OOO, thanx for all the goodies! Boy, that line#690 is a doosey. I especially like that OO Impress file!

Thanx,
AJG

[mcreel]

xpvm is on the ISO. If anyone tries out pvm apps with parallelknoppix, I'd be very happy to hear about it. About Octave, Jorge, it's a GNU application that is functionally similar to MATLAB. www.octave.org, the mailing lists, and http://octave.sourceforge.net/ are good places to get information. About the demos of MPITB on the CD, the paper at http://econpapers.hhs.se/paper/aubautbar/637.05.htm discusses them in detail. For the general reader, the 3 Figures at the end will be the most interesting part. You can see that the Monte Carlo problem scales almost linearly.

Thanks for the interest, Michael

BTW, I have heard that parallel povray rendering makes for a slick demo. If anyone has something ready to use, that's another thing I'd like to add. It would need to be self contained in a directory, except for using packages in Debian unstable.

[A. Jorge Garcia]

OK, I just tried knoppix-installer with parallelKNOPPIX. The install seemed to go fine. Then I rebooted the box without the CD so as to configure lilo and my ethernet card and ssh and new users as usual. However, I got this error at boot and the booting process just hangs:

"Loading LinuxEBDA is big; kernel setup stack overlaps LILO second stage"

What the heck is that? Can I install parallelKNOPPIX to hdd?

Regards,
AJG

[mcreel]

I'm surprised that it gives you problems in installing to HD, but maybe something I removed is affecting the installation. Another issue is whether the clustering will work properly after a HD installation. I doubt that it will, since I think the ssh keys are re-generated during a HD install. The clustering you can get using the CD depends upon each node knowing the public key of each other node. That will break, I expect. At any rate, I haven't used ParallelKnoppix for a HD install, and I don't recommend it since you would have security issues if it worked. Cheers, M.

[A. Jorge Garcia]

Well, I can't get PXE to work. The only way I got ClusterKnoppix and Quantian to work was on a hdinstall. Maybe I can modify my hdinstalls to work with MPI or PVM?

Regards,
AJG

[mcreel]

For PXE, have you tried out rom-o-matic? You can create a boot CD or lilo image to simulate PXE booting for network cards that don't support it. I have used it on some old computers with relatively little trouble. You need to know the exact type of network card you have, or be prepared to do a little experimentation. To use it with lilo, just get the zlilo image, put it somewhere on your HD, and create a lilo entry with image=/wherever/.../eb-XXXX.zlilo and a label like label="Netboot", and that should do it. To do clustering with a HD install, I would recommend using ordinary Knoppix to do the HD install, then follow the steps to let you use MPI from there. Good luck, Michael

[A. Jorge Garcia]

My problem with PXE is that I have a conflicting DHCP server on my LAN for WIMPdoze boxes, %$#&%@&#*^%#@*!!!

Anyway, I'll have to use my plain vanilla KNOPPIX hdinstalls and try PVM or MPI with those. The only difference between my LAN of Linux PCs and a true Beowulf is that all but the parent node are headless, right?

BTW, say I get this working the way I want (ie: KNOPPIX + MPI + javaMPI + jdk1.4.1 + ganglia on an ext3 partitoin), is there an easy procedure to make an ISO for a bootable liveCD from such a partition?

Regards,
AJG

[mcreel]

Yes, a conflicting DHCP server is a pain. My solution is to connect things together temporarily using my own switch, which really isn't that time-consuming to set up, or to run at night when the computer room can be disconnected from the university DHCP server. I think that this could be solved by modifying the miniroot.gz file used by the terminal server, but that's beyond my abilities. It would be nice if someone would try to update the terminalserver to get it to work with the 2.6.X kernel, and to solve this DHCP problem. M.

[davecorder]

I'm currently in the middle of getting an ad-hoc Beowulf cluster up and running (consisting of 2 Dell PowerEdge 2650 and 20 Dell PowerEdge 1750 systems with multiple Gig-Ethernet connects, all behind a firewall).

The program I'll be running is PVM-based, so I should have some useful results and comments on that front.

I did notice one thing: there is no error handling in the configuration script when no mounted filesystems are found (the 2650s won't boot Knoppix properly: I have to boot with noscsi then manually modprobe aic7xxx to get the Adaptec SCSI cards to be recognized, and I had neglected mount a working parition before starting the ParallelKnoppix config.

Right now, though, I'm stuck... my nodes are PXE booting, but they're not finding the DHCP server.

Edit: DHCP update: the PXE clients found the DHCP server ok, Knoppix itself couldn't contact that. It appears to be an issue with bootp being enabled in the dhcpd.conf generated by the startup scripts, so I edited the second startup script so that the template dhcpd.conf had the bootp option disabled. That part works fine, how.