Back to School - Part 2

We wrapped up Day 1 of the HPC Workshop yesterday and it was been an interesting day learning about the fundamentals of HPC (Linux and Windows) and got to the point where we have each built up our 4 node HPC cluster.  I have to say that there are much more difficult things to set up on Windows 2003, after the OS was intstalled, it took about 15 minutes to build the 4 node Compute Cluster Server (CCS) cluster.  One cool thing that could have sped up the deployment is the ability to use RIS, ADS or WDS to deploy the OS to bare metal systems and then install and configure the CCS Pack utilizing a RunOnce command once the OS install is complete.

The hardware I am building this on is a set of Dell GX260 desktops with 3.0GHz x64 CPUs with 1GB of ram each.  CCS nodes run a version of 2003 Standard Edition and also requires .NET 2.0, MDSE and Active Directory.  Once the OS is installed and SP2 is installed it was pretty easy to install the Compute Cluster Pack on the head node and set up the networking and then continue on to install the cluster nodes.

Next you should configure Cluster security, by default the Domain Admins have management rights to the cluster and Domain Users have the rights to use the cluster.  I created a couple of groups, Cluster Admins and Cluster Users so i can limit who can do what.  So now I am where I was at the last time I played with CCS, a working 4 node cluster and nothing to run on it :)  That should change today!