Building a super computer – Introduction

Building Windows Clusters

Hardware
Before starting, you should have the following hardware and software:

• At least two computers with Windows XP, Windows NT, SP6 or Windows 2000 networked with some sort of LAN equipment (hub, switch etc.).
• Ensure during the Windows set up phase that TCP/IP, and NETBUI are installed, and that the network is started with all the network cards detected and the correct drivers installed.

We will call these two computers a Windows cluster. You now you need some sort of software that will help you to develop, deploy and execute applications over this cluster. This software is the core of what makes a Windows cluster possible.

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Building a Linux Cluster

Linux clusters are generally more common, robust, efficient and cost effective than Windows clusters. We will now look at the steps involved in building up a Linux cluster. For more information go here .

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Testing Your Linux Cluster

The first program we will run is cpilog. From within the mpich-.2.2.3/examples/basic directory, copy the cpilog exec file (if this file isn’t present, use make command again) to your top-level directory. On our cluster, this is either /root (if we are logged in as root) or /home/DevArticle, if we are logged in as DevArticle (we have installed MPICH both places).

Next, from your top directory, rcp the cpilog file to each node in your cluster, placing the file in the corresponding directory on each node. For example, if I am logged in as DevArticle on the master node, I’ll issue rcp cpilog Slave:/home/ DevArticle to copy cpilog to the DevArticle directory on Slave. I’ll do the same for each node (if there are more than two nodes). If I want to run a program as root, then I’ll copy the cpilog file to the root directories of all nodes on the cluster.

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