Faculty Publications
High Performance Computing Environments Without The Fuss: The Bootable Cluster CD
Document Type
Conference
Keywords
Clustering environments, Diskless clusters, High performance computing education, High performance computing environments, Practical experiences with parallel and distributed systems, PXE-boot clusters
Journal/Book/Conference Title
Proceedings - 19th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, IPDPS 2005
Volume
2005
Abstract
This paper confronts the issue of bringing high performance computing (HPC) education to those who do not have access to a dedicated clustering environments in an easy, fully-functional, inexpensive manner through the use of the "Bootable Cluster CD" (BCCD). As an example, many primarily undergraduate institutions (PUI's) do not have the facilities, time, or money to purchase hardware, maintain user accounts, configure software components, and keep ahead of the latest security advisories for a dedicated clustering environment. The BCCD project's primary goal is to support an instantaneous, drop-in distributed computing environment. A consequence of providing such an environment is the ability to promote the education of high performance computing issues at the undergraduate level through the ability to turn an ordinary lab of networked workstations temporarily into a non-invasive, fully-functional clustering classroom. The BCCD itself is a self-contained clustering environment in a bootable CD format. Using the BCCD, students, educators and researchers are able to gain insight into configuration, utilization, troubleshooting, debugging, and administration issues uniquely associated with parallel computing in a live, easy to use "drop-in" clustering environment. As the name implies, the BCCD provides a full, cohesive clustering environment running GNU/Linux when booted from the CDROM drives of networked workstations.
Department
Department of Computer Science
Original Publication Date
12-1-2005
DOI of published version
10.1109/IPDPS.2005.244
Recommended Citation
Diesburg, Sarah M.; Gray, Paul A.; and Joiner, David, "High Performance Computing Environments Without The Fuss: The Bootable Cluster CD" (2005). Faculty Publications. 2883.
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/facpub/2883
