[gentoo-user] Gentoo Cluster:: dirt simple

[james]

Howdy,


I ran across an old, (use to be) deprecated set of cluster instructions 
for a Beowulf cluster. Nothing fancy but dirt simple to set up, with 
NFS. But the really cool thing now is NFS can be replace with OrangeFS 
(eix -R orangefs) or OpenAFS as both are now supported in portage 
(thanks Bircoph & NPH!). Dunno about cephfs or others. OrangeFS grew out 
of the old PVM codes.


So this clusters can be build on very old hardware or modern embedded 
systems or new hardware. There are a few tweaks and package name 
changes, but it's all still either in portage or we can replace the 
components easily. I have not had time  to build it, yet, as I'm still 
fiddling with various HD configurations. A rewrite of the instructions 
centric to replacing NFS with a Distributed File System would be a 
fantastic enhancement. But with 100M or 1G ethernet, this puppy should 
be easy and fun to build, low cost and readily expandable to a mix of 
embedded or old systems as well as new (efi) based hardware. It will 
probably be pretty fast too, relative to the hardware used. NFS was the 
"big_pig" that killed this clustering approach, back in the day, imho.

Kernel tweaks (OrangeFS requires 4.6 or later) are an area that can be 
experimented around with too, after a test cluster is booted. I have not 
mucked around with DKC 'Dynamic Kernel Changes' on live systems yet, but 
that would surely speed up experimentation, if anyone knows where any 
docs are on that centric to gentoo or just post the basic steps to DKC.


The est part is it (should) work with or without systemd install-able 
on: bare metal, VM or containerized platforms. Surely there are a 
multitude of tweaks that can be made to greatly accelerate this approach 
to gentoo clustering.


The old wulfware code (sys-cluster/wulfware) is still around to monitor 
such this cluster, as a simple package. Anyone ambitious cold post how 
to alter these instructions for a VM or container based gentoo install. 
I was working my way to a similar approach when this url just popped up 
today:: [1]

[1] https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-433435-start-0.html


enjoy,
James