The Clustering Page


Growing up, I loved tinkering with computer hardware (in fact I had quite a collection of old junk) and dreamed of one day having enough of the right resources to put together my own Beowulf-style Linux Cluster.  During my freshman year of college (2005-2006), I had the chance to work with a few other students on helping a professor with an embarrisingly parallel Beowulf (it used the campus network for a backbone) for pulsar data processing.  In the 2006-2007 school year, Haverford's new physics professor, Peter Love, purchased a blade server to use as a HPC Linux Cluster and I simultaneously inherited several of the better computers from the old cluster.  I know help maintain the Haverford Cluster, as well as a small personal cluster in my dorm room (house in summer).  What follows below are the guides that we put together during the installation of the cluster.  If you'd like more information or want to make suggestions/corrections please e-mail me:
aohara[at]haverford[dot]edu (replace[at] and [dot] with appropriate symbols).

Guides (all are pdf's):
1. General Outline
2. Password-less SSH
3. Distributed Shell
4. Network Time Protocal
5. Network File System
6. Torque Resource Manager
7. Maui Scheduler
8. OpenMPI
9. Basic Cluster Security (ADDED 1/20/08)

We also setup an on-site Ubuntu Mirror.  This is useful for both updating nodes not directly on the internet.  We didn't write up a guide for this, because the Ubuntu forums have a great how-to for this.