Live CD Clustering Using ParallelKnoppix

If you’ve run across Beowulf (http://www.beowulf.org/) or another cluster implementation, but thought that assembling your own cluster was either too complicated or too resource-intensive, cheer up! Given five minutes, a specialized, live Linux distribution called ParallelKnoppix, and a handful of ordinary personal computers, you too can build your very own mini-mini-mini-supercomputer.

ParallelKnoppix (http://pareto.uab.es/mcreel/ParallelKnoppix/), a remaster of the Knoppix (http://www.knoppix.org/) live CD distribution, allows you to construct a parallel processing cluster using off-the-shelf desktops, laptops, and servers, and the LAM-MPI and/or MPICH implementations of the Message Passing Interface (and PVM). Moreover, because ParallelKnoppix is a live CD, you can convert a room full of machines — even those running Windows — into a Linux cluster without affecting the natively-installed operating system. Getting a cluster up and running takes about five minutes if all of your machines have PXE network cards. Clusters from two to 200 machines are supported.

The first thing to do is download the ParallelKnoppix ISO image from http://pareto.uab.es/mcreel/ParallelKnoppix/ and burn one CD for each computer you’d like to include in the cluster. Next, boot one of the machines you’ll be using with the CD. (Keep in mind that you’ll need at least one Linux accessible partition on this machine. If the machine in question only has NTFS partitions, you can use a USB drive formatted as FAT32 to gain the needed space.) The machine…

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