20130624 - This manual is being built out of my notes that I have made and collected over the years. I am not a fan of how much work is duplicated in these notes. Especially since so much of it can and should be automated. Thus I have been spending quite a bit of time working on cleaning these notes up some before progressing any further. I will begin shortly revamping the notes to make it a simpler, smoother process.
20130518 - I'm back! After a couple weeks of downtime due to my HD failing on my frontend node* I have the RMA replacement back in and working. Now to get back to working on this project. * Hey, this is my personal playground cluster. I can't afford high availibility on it quite yet. :-)
20130518 - Cluster rebuild is going smoothly. I made a ton of updates as I am going through the whole process after so much work has been put into it. Glad to see there were only a few minor points that needed to be adjusted.
This guide and documentation is under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike CC BY-SA license as found here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode
The guide is hosted here: https://github.com/cstackpole/ClusterBuilderManual/wiki.
A guide on how to build a cluster. Note, there are many interpretations on how to build a cluster. Ultimately it depends on the workload that the cluster is going to be doing. This guide is meant to be used as a learning experience as well as a good reference for other cluster admins.
I started this guide as just a collection of notes that I took when I build clusters. I organized them on a wiki for a time, but they were not complete nor without occasional errors. A friend, almightybeej, cleaned up a significant portion of the manual and added screenshots for the installation.
Now I find that the notes are getting stale and have a few errors simply due to the nature of ever-changing and evolving software. Thus, I have decided to once again update the notes. However, I would like to better track changes and I would love to expand on these notes to include more on how to use and manage the cluster so I decided to use git as a way to manage the updates. Since git doesn't handle pdf or odf very well, I decided to try markdown after a recommendation from one of the puppet developers. At this time, I am using the markdown format needed for the document to be hosted on the github repository. All edits should be on the wiki for the time being.
To get started with this guide, head over to the wiki page: https://github.com/cstackpole/ClusterBuilderManual/wiki
Massive props go out to the almightybeej for his help in testing many of these notes and whose expertiese on Cbench is always helpful. :-)
All the open-source projects that I use on a day-to-day basis.
Verify that every project mentioned in the guide has a link to the website / original authors.
Make it look pretty.
Organize it for PDF format later down the road.
Add content for all the 'Coming Soon' placeholders.
Ensure that every page gets the license placed neatly at the bottom of the page.
Upload the learn MPI code