A Linux PC Cluster with Diskless Slave Nodes for Parallel Computing
Chao‐Tung Yang, Yao-Chung Chang · 2003
Abstract. This document describes how to set up a diskless Linux box. As technology is advancing rapidly, network-cards are becoming cheaper and much faster-100 Mbits/s Ethernet is common now and in about 1 year 1000 Mbits/s i.e. 1GigBits Ethernet cards will become a standard. With high-speed network cards, remote access will become as fast as the local disk access which will make diskless nodes a viable alternative to workstations in local LAN. Also diskless nodes eliminate the cost of software upgrades and system administration costs like backup, recovery which will be centralized on the server side. Diskless nodes also enable “sharing/optimization ” of centralized server CPU, memory, hard-disk, tape and CDROM resources. Diskless nodes provides mobility for the users i.e., users can log on from any one of diskless nodes and are not tied to one workstation. In this paper, a SMP-based PC cluster consists of one master node and eight diskless slave nodes (16 processors), is proposed and built. The system architecture and benchmark performances of the cluster are also presented in this paper. 1