Resources for Building a Beowulf Cluster

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Protogonus is our Beowulf cluster used for preparing, debugging and inspecting various parallel applications that use MPI.

This list was compiled early 2021 as we were building the Protogonus HPC Cluster. There is a lot of outdated information available on the internet and for each of the links below, we recommend you check their dates just to be sure.

Preparing Windows

Novabench

Putty

Windows: creating and formatting partitions

Five easy steps to install Putty and connect to Ubuntu

Initial booting problem

Bios access by maker

Bootorder not found

Cannot boot from USB

Installing Ubuntu

How can I install Ubuntu without a CD and USB?

Netbooting the live server installer

Rufus

Best way to make Ubuntu installation as lean as possible

How to boot from USB disk (Lenovo laptops)

Ubuntu Server install step by step

Ubuntu Server autoinstall

Install Unbuntu Server, overview

Ubuntu Server installation

Ubuntu 20.04 LT Server installation

What does a mount point mean in a linux installer

Ubuntu Existing server installation on existing partition

Minor problems after install

Cloud Login init as in as screen

Removing cloud init

A start job is running for wait for network

Configure mount timeout at boot

Initial Ubuntu setup

How can I set a second network interface

Connecting to WIFI via the command line

Connect wifi using the terminal

Enable SSH on Ubuntu

How to setup a static ip for network manager

Netplan apply does not change the IP address

Static IP for Linux

How to configure static IP address on ubuntu 20.04

Deleting connections by name (network manager)

Passwordless SSH

NMCLI network information

How to manage In in se via se nmcli

How to create an NFS file system

Cluster management

Clush (cluster shell)

Running commands in parallel on Linux clusters

Sudo over SSH howto

Bechmarking the CPU on Linux

Beowulf-specific information

Beowulf Howto

Lam, MPI and Open MPI

Beowulf.org FAQ

Mpich (Wikipedia)

Mpich vs Open MPI (Stackoverflow)

Open MPI .org

Mpich.org

Mpich.org: the Hydra process manager

Open MPI or Mpich (reddit)

Open MPI Multithreading (stackoverflow)

MPICH vs Open MPI (Quora entry)

Open MPI programmning and setup

Open MPI man page (Ubuntu.com)

Open MPI (Wikipedia)

Building a Beowulf cluster

Beowulf cluster using old Macbooks

Other clustering approaches

Rocksclusters

Small distributed computing cluster

OpenMP (Wikipedia)


Learn More

You can read the Executive Summary of Protogonus, our Construction Journal, and step-by-step instructions based on our experience.