Kestrel pecks my eye out

Poison.

Many of the hackers I hang out with have their preconceptions and biases about technology.  When it comes to Linux distributions and package management systems those biases are near religion (almost as bad as their choice of editor: vim versus emacs anyone?).  Since Ubuntu is commonly used as an engineeering desktop at work, Debian (its precurser) and its package management is buried deep in the mental subconscious.  So much so, we even started (a couple of years ago) adopting Debian packages and (to a limited degree) apt tools for Solaris package management.

So its was with that background that I attempted to boot the thin nodes in the cluster using Ubuntu as a base distribution (first on the master -- a comodity Inspiron 620 Dell i5 system with 4Gigs RAM).  Since the software partition was going to be shared with the compute nodes (each with 16Gigs of RAM), the architecture had to be x86_64.

My first attempt at booting the thin node cluster was to use kestrelHPC which is an antecedent of PelicanHPC.  KestrelHPC had a nice web page, and a forum, and it all looked too good to be true.  Unfortunately for me with my recent Ubuntu distribution(s) it was.  I took several runs at it and even started digging into the scripts that held Kestrel together, but the PXE booted compute nodes kept kernel panicing on me.

To be fair, I was just starting out with this cluster booting problem.  Its hard to get the first thing you try to work when you are new to it.  Reading the forum more frequently, I determined that the KestrelHPC users seemed a bit more biased in the direction of RedHat (and similar distributions) and rpm packaging in terms of what they used for a base Linux distribution.  It might also be the case that I was off the beaten track.

In the end, I walked away from KestrelHPC and tried something else (DRBL) which seems longer in the tooth, and possibly more widely used.  I will describe DRBL in a later post.  KestrelHPC might work for you and your hardware, but for the equipment I chose, not so much.