Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Provisioning a MPICH cluster

As follows is shown how to deploy and test a cluster which uses MPICH as library for supporting message passing paradigm.
The process is divided in four steps (each step is accompanied by a video where a description of the each step is presented) and a final step where the up and running cluster is presented.

Steps

  1. Creating/installing the operating system(OPTIONAL). http://showterm.io/d10fc998748cc57cf3eb6
    1. Vagrant is the tool used to rapid provision of virtual machines. http://www.vagrantup.com
    2. The Vagrantfile used to deploy the machines in this demo is located in this github repository, directory cluster.
    3. Este archivo crea tres máquinas virtuales (un nodo maestro y dos nodos de procesamiento).
  2. Preparing virtual machines for accepting chef recipes. http://showterm.io/b3591039c559e34f4798a
    1. To run the chef recipes is necessary that each machine where the provision process will be run has a user having root privileges with no password when the sudo command is invoked.
    2. knife-solo command needs to be installed in the machine where the provisioning process will be run (e.g. gem install knife-solo). 
    3. Scripts used in this video can be downloaded from here.
  3. Tailoring the configuration for your particular needs. http://showterm.io/3c9a596c2fa39ddf3a402
    1. Two python scripts and one bash script were written at this time to tailor the configuration for this demo however the scripts can be used in your own test environment
    2. The files can be obtained from this github repository
  4. Provisioning the cluster. http://showterm.io/9fee9e1fc5f8e19192698
  5. Using the cluster. http://showterm.io/f5cbb251b2c37cee19e8d