vmhpc

Build a small and fake Linux HPC cluster with some virtual machines on your workstation.

Disclaimer: this is not real HPC! Do not expect good performances at all.

This testbed only aims to show and explain how real Linux HPC clusters work. The purpose is purely educational. The targeted audience is any people who feel curious about these systems and want to experiment with their software technologies.

The cluster employs the following software:

• Debian GNU/Linux
• ansible
• dnsmasq
• slurm
• openmpi
• cblas
• openldap
• nfs
• clustershell

The cluster is composed of 5 nodes:

• admin, the cluster administration server which provides the following services:
  • Slurm controller
  • ansible server
  • LDAP server
  • NFS server
  • PXE server (DHCP/TFTP)
  • APT repository proxy
  • DNS server
• login:
  • SSH frontend for users
  • Scientific codes compilation
  • Slurm jobs submission
• cn[1-3]
  • Slurm jobs execution

Requirements

Hardware:

• CPU with H/W virtualization instructions enable (VT-x or AMD-V)
• 4GB of RAM
• about 15GB of disk space
• good Internet connection

Software:

• GNU/Linux workstation and fairly recent Linux kernel
• cloubed >= 0.5 with all its dependencies including Libvirt and KVM
• fabric

Usage

Cluster installation

Simply run the following command:

$ fab install_cluster

This will automatically create all virtual networks, launch, install and configure all virtual machines. At the end, the cluster will be fully operational.

Beware, it takes quite a while to run, about 2 hours on a decent workstation. Note that it also downloads about 600MB of debian packages over the Internet.

At the end, you will be able to:

• connect on login node as normal user
• compile a scientific code that uses BLAS and MPI, such as HPL linpack
• run it in on compute nodes with Slurm workload manager

Connect to admin node

From your workstation:

$ ssh -F http/ssh_config admin

Connect to login node

From your workstation:

$ ssh -F http/ssh_config {pierre,marie}@login

Default password is secret.

Shutdown the cluster

From admin node as root:

# clush -g all halt
# halt

Boot the cluster

If the cluster has already been installed and you want to boot all nodes, run the following command from your workstation:

$ fab boot_cluster