Cluster software

[fivemack]

Has anyone on the forum tried using things like oar or slurm to manage their home compute farms? They look rather more designed for organisations who have a hundred identical boxes in a cluster and who want to launch tasks which have to reserve eight nodes attached to the same rack switch, but with even five heterogenous boxes I wonder whether doing all my batch scheduling on one box at a time with make might not be the best way to go.

[VBCurtis]

I have been wondering the very-same thing! I'm willing to do clean installs of OS/low-level components if I can control 4+ boxen from one scheduler. If "the cloud" really is everywhere, this sort of control system should be available Real Soon Now in open-source.

I've found systems that claim to do roughly this, but I'm chicken to be first to try it among forumites. If anyone does try this out, please let us know!

[Dubslow]

I'll gladly try it out if someone gives me a cluster

[jwaltos]

I've been expoloring how best to coordinate heterogeneous boxes loaded with gpu's as well.
I've read a few books on the methods and software available but nothing struck me as having the versatility I'm looking for.

[kladner]

Originally Posted by Dubslow

I'll gladly try it out if someone gives me a cluster

[stebbo]

Hi All,

Has anyone gone any further with this? I've come into a number of old PC's and would be keen to setup a cluster with them. It sounds like a great project for some of our students and would also contribute to this cause.

I've had a very quick look at PelicanHPC, LinuxMPI and SLURM/SchedMD and am wondering if I'm on the right track with these?

Cheers,
Chris.

P.S. it also seems that Perceus and/or the LTSP might be worth investigating further.