[tech] searching for DEC-compatible network cards

Davyd Madeley davyd at madeley.id.au
Sat Jul 2 18:48:47 WST 2005


On Sat, 2005-07-02 at 18:25 +0800, Cameron Patrick wrote:
> (Davyd: Replying on-list since nothing in the reply seemed like it
> should be personal.  Feel free to LART me next time we meet if
> otherwise :-P)

Seems I used to wrong reply button. Thanks for pointing it out.

> > Indeed, that may be an option. With the challenges of clustering, ie.
> > making sure machines are running the same kernel version and tools etc.
> > Network booting would be a really nice thing to have. I seem to recall
> > that version 7 of SRM was released recently. Perhaps this plays nice
> > with more things.
> 
> Perhaps.  We'll see what works, I suppose.

According to AlphaLinux.org...
"""Three steps are necessary before Linux can be booted via a network.
First you need an Ethernet adapter that is supported by SRM. Most
version of SRM support the DE500 series of cards, with newer versions
(5.6 and later) also supporting the Intel EtherExpress/Pro series of
cards."""

Aah, good ole' reliable EEPros. Now, I know there was a certain UCCan
who had a lot of the 100mbit ones. I suspect we could also borrow a
gigabit one to test (the e1000 is a popular card). From memory,
melanopus is running SRM 5.7. SRM is upgradable.

> I've never used it, but it looks an initrd that handles most of the
> pain for you.  If it's not already ported to Alpha, it shouldn't be
> _too_ hard (famous last words).  Then you can plop on something like
> SGE (Sun Grid Engine - openish libre software), and/or use apps which
> know MPI/PVM clustering libs.

I was hoping for one of those cool SSI implementations where the cluster
appears as one 14 CPU machine with a shared ps tree, filesystem and what
have you. We'll investigate OpenSSI more when we have them booting
something.

> > I suppose there is always the classic favourite of OpenVMS, or we could
> > try going to HP to get a license for TruCluster.
> 
> Well, we don't have any OpenVMS machines at UCC (at least not
> user-accessible) so these Alphas could buck that trend :-)

True. The question is would a 14 CPU VMS cluster get used for anything.
I believe that programming for VMS is a little more challenging then
programming for UNIX. Of course, would a 14 CPU UNIX cluster really get
used, or would it just become the latest thing to strain under Nick's
enormous mailbox?

--d

-- 
Davyd Madeley              http://www.davyd.id.au/

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