PAR Technologies PARASTATION5 V5 - Manual (Page 9)

ParaStation5 Administrator's Guide 5
Chapter 3. Installation
This chapter describes the installation of ParaStation5. At first, the prerequisites to use ParaStation5 are
discussed. Next, the directory structure of all installed components is explained. Finally, the installation
using RPM packages is described in detail.
Of course, the less automated the chosen way of installation is, the more possibilities of customization
within the installation process occur. On the other hand even the most automated way of installation, the
installation via RPM, will give a suitable result in most cases.
For a quick installation guide refer to Appendix A, Quick Installation Guide.
3.1. Prerequisites
In order to prepare a bunch of nodes for the installation of the ParaStation5 communication system, a few
prerequisites have to be met.
Hardware
The cluster must have a homogeneous processor architecture, i.e. Intel IA32 and AMD IA32 can be used
together, but not Intel IA32 and IA64
1
. The supported processor architectures up to now are:
• i586 : Intel IA32 (including AMD Athlon)
• ia64 : Intel IA64
• x86_64 : Intel EM64T and AMD64
• ppc : IBM Power4 and Power5
Multi-core CPUs are supported, as well as single and multi-CPU (SMP) nodes.
Furthermore the nodes need to be interconnected. In principle, ParaStation5 uses two different kinds of
interconnects:
• At first a so called administration network which is used to handle all the administrative tasks that have
to be dealt with within a cluster. Besides commonly used services like sharing of NFS partitions or NIS
tables, on a ParaStation cluster, this also includes the inter-daemon communication used to implement
the effective cluster administration and parallel task handling mechanisms. This administration network
is usually implemented using a Fast or Gigabit Ethernet network.
• Secondly a high speed interconnect is required in order to do high bandwidth, low latency communication
within parallel applications. While historically this kind of communication is usually done using specialized
highspeed networks like Myrinet, nowadays Gigabit Ethernet is a much cheaper and only slightly
slower alternative. ParaStation5 currently supports Ethernet (Fast, Gigabit and 10G Ethernet), Myrinet,
InfiniBand, QsNetII and Shared Memory.
If IP connections over the high speed interconnect are available, it is not required to really have two distinct
networks. Instead it is possible to use one physical network for both tasks. IP connections are usually
configured by default in the case of Ethernet. For other networks, particular measures have to be taken in
order to enable IP over these interconnects.
1
It is possible to spawn a ParaStation cluster across multiple processor architectures. The daemons will communicate with each
other, but this is currently not a supported configuration. For more details, please contact <[email protected]> .