Building a simple Beowulf cluster with ubuntu

Here I am sharing my experience of creating a simple Beowulf cluster with ubuntu.

I have used 3 ubuntu 12.04 systems for setting the cluster taking one as master node and two other as compute node.

 

You can find the detailed procedure for setting up the cluster here.

Major steps involved are as follows:

 Configuring the nodes

1. Add the nodes to the hosts file(see here)
2. Defining a user for running MPI jobs(see here)
3. Install and setup the Network File System(see here)
4. Setup passwordless SSH for communication between nodes(see here)
5. Setting up the process manager(see here)

Running  a job like MPICH2 example applications or Bioinformarics tool on cluster.

General Misconception:-

Most of the time people think that for setting up a cluster they should have same versions of ubuntu  on all nodes  but this is just a misconception.

As long as the flavour of Linux is same there is no problem in setting a cluster even if the nodes in cluster are having different versions of OS.

I hope it will be helpful.