Fri Aug 28 2009
Author: burnin

Its alive!

LOL

About 5 years ago, maybe more, I constructed a computer cluster with six nodes with one node booting from a hard drive and running TFTP, DHCP, and NFS to provide PXE Boot services and NFS root for the other five nodes. After using the system for a couple of years I started parting it out to build computers for my nieces and nephews.

Recently I started upgrading the computers for my nieces and nephews and had all the original hardware for the cluster. So I decided to revive the system.

And here it is, back from the parts bin, Ironhead...


Six Shuttle all in one motherboards running AMD 2200+ Sempron 32 bit processors and RAM quantities ranging from 512MB to 256MB.

The motherboard on the top has an 80GB IDE hard drive mounted on the other side from which it boots Fedora 11 and starts up DHCP, TFTP and NFS services.

The remaining five motherboards are configured to PXE Boot over Ethernet and using a Fedora kernel compiled with the needed additions they mount an NFS root file system.

In the past the cluster was used to run SETI radio signal analysis, for clustered transcoding experiments, and was used to experiment with some custom clustering applications. For now each node is running Folding@Home and there are not further plans.

burnin