Without serious Linux savvy, in- stallation and administration of a Beowulf cluster can be cumbersome and time con- suming, particularly when the cluster consists of more than a handful of nodes. Lack of a single system image — one operating system controlling all nodes simultaneously — makes day-to-day administration challenging. The result is that, without software tools, you must maintain each node individually.
Without serious Linux savvy, in- stallation and administration of a Beowulf cluster can be cumbersome and time con- suming, particularly when the cluster consists of more than a handful of nodes. Lack of a single system image — one operating system controlling all nodes simultaneously — makes day-to-day administration challenging. The result is that, without software tools, you must maintain each node individually.
Although both free and commercial clustering toolkits are now becoming available to alleviate some of the problems that you will encounter, configuring a Beowulf cluster without a toolkit requires a little bit of ingenuity, but this approach affords the user or administrator more options in the design of the system.
Fortunately, all nodes in a cluster except the first one usually are configured identically. While they may consist of different hardware components, they typically run the same kernel and application software and have the same file system layout. This means that you can clone all the compute nodes in a cluster from a single pre-configured system.
Figure One: A front-end node is attached to a public network, and the other nodes are connected to each other and to it.
Public vs. Private
In a typical Beowulf configuration, one node — often having more memory and large…
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