For the SIA-based installation of the full cluster and the frontend, the following requirements have to be met:
Homogeneous cluster nodes: All nodes of the cluster are of the same CPU architecture and run the same kernel version. The frontend machine may be of different CPU architecture and kernel version!
The installation of the Dolphin Express software on a system that does not satisfy this requirement is described in Chapter 6, Manual Installation,Section 2, “Installation of a Heterogeneous Cluster”
RPM support: The Linux distribution on the nodes, the frontend and the installation machine needs to support RPM packages. Both major distributions from Red Hat and Novell (SuSE) use RPM packages.
On platforms that do not support RPM packages, it is also possible to install the Dolphin Express software. Please see Chapter 6, Manual Installation,Section 4, “Unpackaged Installation” for instructions.
Installed RPM packages: To build the Dolphin Express software stack, a few RPM packages that are often not installed by default are required:
qt and qt-devel (> version 3.0.5), , glibc-devel and libgcc (32- and 64-bit, depending on what binary formats should be supported), rpm-build, and the kernel header files and configuration (typically a kernel-devel or kernel-source RPM that exactly(!) matches the version of the installed kernel) |
The SIA will check for these packages, report what packages might be missing and will offer to install them if the yum RPM management system is supported on the affected machine. All required RPM packages are within the standard set of RPM packages offered for your Linux distribution, but may not be installed by default.
If the qt-RPMs are not available, the Dolphin Express software stack can be built nevertheless, but the GUI applications to configure and manage the cluster will not be available. Please see below (Section 1.2, “Non-GUI Installation”) on how to install the software stack in this case.
GUI support: for the initial installation, the installation machine should be able to run GUI application via X. .
If the required configuration files are already available prior to the installation, a GUI is not required (see section Section 1.2, “Non-GUI Installation”).
Disk space: To build the RPM packages, about 500MB free disk space in the system's temporary directory (typically /tmp on Linux) are required on the kernel build machine and the frontend.
It is possible to assign SIA to use a specific temporary directory for building using the --build-root option.
Dolphin Express can be installed into a cluster which is currently under operation without stopping the cluster application from working. This requires that the application running on the cluster can cope with single nodes going down. It is only necessary to turn off each node once to install the adapter. The software installation can be performed under load, although minor performance impacts are possible. For a description of this installation type, please proceed as described in Chapter 6, Manual Installation,Section 1, “Installation under Load”
The Dolphin software includes two GUI tools:
dishostseditor is a tool that is used to create the interconnect configuration file /etc/dis/dishosts.conf and the network manager configuration file /etc/dis/networkmanager.conf. It is needed once on the initial cluster installation, and each time nodes are added or removed from the cluster.
sciadmin is used to monitor and control the cluster interconnect.
If the frontend does not support running GUI applications, but another machine in the network does, it is possible to run the installation on this machine. The only requirement is ssh-access from the installation machine towards the frontend and all nodes. This installation mode can be chosen by executing the SIA on the installation machine and specifying the frontend name when being asked for it.
In this scenario, the dishostseditor will be compiled, installed and executed on the installation machine, and the generated configuration files will be transferred to the frontend by the installer.
If no machine in the network does have the capability to run GUI applications, you can still use the SIA-based installation. In this case, it is necessary to create the correct configuration files on another machine and store them in /etc/dis on the frontend before executing the SIA on the frontend (not on another machine).
In this scenario, no GUI application is run at all during the installation. To create the the configuration files on another machine, you can either run the SIA with the --install-editor option if it is a Linux machine, or install a binary version of the dishostseditor if it is a Windows-based machine. Finally, you can send the necessary information to create the configuration files to Dolphin support which will then provide you with the matching configuration files and the cabling instructions. This information includes:
external hostnames (or IP adresses) of all nodes
adapter type and number of fabrics (1 or 2)
hostnames (or IP adresses/subnet) which should be accelerated with SuperSockets (default is the list of hostnames provided above)
planned interconnect topology (default is derived from number of nodes and adapter type)
description of how nodes are physically located (to avoid cabling problems)