Building a new cluster

Hi all,

I'm trying to build a cluster from some pretty off the shelf hardware, a couple dell dimensions, precisions, and inspirons running intel and amd processors. The one piece of hardware I have that isn't as consumer grade as the others is the system I want as the Head Node. Its a Dell PowerEdge 2950 server w/Two Intel Xeon 5160 processors and 8GB ram.

Basically, I want to build a cluster out of these systems that I can use to run a couple of programs (or at least their distributed equivalents) that are heavy number crunchers in a distributed manner so I can get the work done quickly. The main issue is going to be that the compute nodes will have to boot via PXE as they don't have hard disks. I tried using PelicanHPC but was unable to get the compute nodes to boot over PXE.

Any help with this is appreciated. If any more info is needed, I'll reply as quickly as possible. Thanks in advance.

 

Take a look at Red Hat Cluster Suite. One thing to consider is that you'd better build a Cloud computing system, which means to use virtualization. In order to use any advanced Cloud computing (virtualization) platform, you'd need to get a new hardware as most software platforms are compatible with certain CPU and other hardware specifications.

 

You could use Ubuntu with the MicroK8s as a way to start building your cluster.