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The design pages describe the way that hardware and software is installed and configured on the medusa beowulf. Please read them carefully as abide by them. It will be a lot easier to manage 300 machines if they are configured in a sane, sensible way.
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Please remember the following points before doing anything as root:
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The operating system on the medusa beowulf is essentially Red Hat 7.3. We have installed all relevant security patches and updates from Red Hat. We have also updated the kernel to the latest 2.4 kernel available at the time of installation.
The above configuration is performed in the master and slave kickstart script. Refer to this script and the comps file used in the kickstart process for an up to date list of software version numbers on the slaves and masters.
The system is centered arount the internal FastIron switch. 300 nodes are designated as slaves and connected to this switch. Two nodes are designated as masters and are connected to the switch and the external physics department subnet. A further node is designated as dataserver and is connected to the internal switch and the physics department subnet. The machine called uwmlsc is the groups RAID based file server and is connected both to the outside world and the internal network.
The slave nodes are Pentium III machines from ACE computer. The bid specifcation gives the exact specifications for these machines. These machines are connected by their internal 100baseT ethernet connector to the switch.
Currently the two masters and dataserver are regular nodes with two Netgear GA-620T 1000baseT ethernet cards. They may be upgraded to faster machines in the future.
uwmlsc is a RAID 5 based file server connected via gigabit to the internal ane external subnets.
A PDF diagram of the network topology for the medusa beowulf is available. This should be followed during construction of the system.
The IP address page gives complete details of the networking configuration.
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