Endeavour

Endeavour

Here are the notes on this system.
Notes on configuration status/changes and ToDo is at the bottom.

System Usage

This section explains some of the special use for this system.

OpenPBS = Torque = Portable Batch System

PBS is a system for scheduling compute jobs onto nodes, aka "workload management software", that was first created by NASA in the '90s. We ran this early version on our farm back then. It is very sophisticated and thus not so trivial to configure. Some things are already setup.

The company supporting the old open source version is PBS Gridworks which seems to be a devision of "Altair". They haven't touched their free open version since 2001.
There are no manuals for OpenPBS from Altair, only for PBS Pro. To get to them, you need to create a username/password at the PBS Pro User Area you can then get to the Documentation. Do not expect a one to one correspondence between the OpenPBS and PBSPro versions (like, you don't need a FLEX license for the open one.)

The newer development in OpenPBS is renamed Torque, which is what is installed on our systems. See Cluster Resources and go to Torque Resource Manager. This includes documentation.

Commands

pbsnodes

This gives a quick overview of all the known nodes and whether they are up. If they are what the status is.

xpbs

Graphical interface to PBS

xpbsmon

Graphical interface to monitor nodes. (nice)

Initial setup and Configuration

• Set the UNH IP address (endeavour.unh.edu) on eth1.
  • This made the system think of itself as "endeavor" rather than "master", causing PBS to get confused. PBS in /var/spool/pbs adjusted, also the maui scheduler in /usr/local/maui/maui.cfg modified.
• I switched the IP address on eth0 to 10.0.0.100 from 10.0.0.1 (since that is the usual gateway address, and we want to bridge the two backend networks.)
  • This requires ALL "hosts" files on the nodes to be modified
  • Also, the /root/.shosts /root/.rhosts and /etc/ssh/ssh_known_hosts files need to be copied from node2 to node*
• Set the root password to standard scheme.
• Setup the LDAP client side.
• Recompiled PBS to include the xpbs and xpbsmon commands.
• Configured and started the iptables firewall
• Integrated the backend network with the farm backend network (bridged the network switches)
• Setup automount, standard /net/data and /net/home
  • TODO: We need a new rule that resolves /net/data/node2 for the disk in node2 etc. The nodes need to export their /scratch partition. The other partitions may not be needed, since the "rcpf" command (a foreach with rcp) can copy files in batch.
• The /etc/nodes file included the "master" node. This is too dangerous. It means that in a batch copy the file is also automatically copy back to the master, with potentially dangerous results.

TO DO

1. Lots.
2. Figure out the monitoring system, Ganglia, and other Microway goodies.
3. Note: Bring other slaves up to spec to node2
   1. Need to copy: /root/.rhosts /root/.shosts /etc/nodes

Long Term To Do

Possible long term tasks if manpower is available.

1. Replicate LDAP server.
2. Replicate home directories for selected users (this may be too tricky, really)