Building of a GNU/Linux-based Bootable Cluster CD
Paul A. Gray, J. W. Chapin, Tobias McNulty · 2006
Abstract. The Bootable Cluster CD (BCCD) is an established, well maintained, cluster toolkit used nationally and internationally within several levels of the academic system. During the Education Programs of Supercomputing conferences 2002, 2003, and 2004, the BCCD image was used to support instruction of issues related to parallel computing education. It has been used in the undergraduate curriculum to illustrate principles of parallelism and distributed com-puting and widely used to facilitate graduate research in parallel environments. The standard BCCD image is packaged in the 3”, mini-CD format, easily fitting inside most wallets and purses. Variations include PXE-bootable (network-bootable) and USB-stick bootable images. All software components are pre-configured to work together making the time required to go from boot-up to functional cluster less than five minutes. A typical Windows or Macintosh lab can be temporarily converted into a working GNU/Linux-based computational cluster without modification to original disk or operating system. Students can immediately use this computa-tional cluster framework to run a variety of real scientific models conveniently located on the BCCD and downloadable into any running BCCD environment. This paper discusses building, configuring, modifying, and deploying aspects of the Bootable Cluster CD.