New hardware!
February 2, 2009by Wm. Josiah Erikson (wjens)
Dan and I went up to Dartmouth last week and got some new hardware: the previously mentioned blades, as well as some (free!) older Opteron machines that are nonetheless pretty decent and will probably be added to the cluster as well: four dual 2.0Ghz (I think) machines with 4GB of RAM each. These are, of course, x86_64 (as are the blades), so, since all of rack 1 is also 64-bit, now I kindof want to create an x86_64 distro so that we can take advantage of the faster speed and greater memory-per-process capabilities of 64-bit RenderMan in particular, but probably other things as well. This is going to require some hacking, as the head node is going to remain 32-bit, just because there isn’t any other node I can stuff enough disk into. ROCKS has support for this, but only if you boot the nodes from CD the initial time… I don’t have CD-ROM drives in many of my nodes in rack 1, so I’m going to have to hack the PXE boot… not a big deal, I don’t think.
Right now I’m waiting for a new plug in the server room, because though I checked whether I had the right plug in there already, I didn’t check the voltage…. the ones in there are 120V and I need 240V. D’oh! This should happen tomorrow, theoretically.
On my plate now is to remove all the old 2GB nodes from the rack and use their spare parts to fix the 4GB nodes that are down, and then physically place the new nodes in the rack.
Then I’ve got to back up the old config and install ROCKS 5.1
Fun! I’ll keep posting as I make more progress.