Installation and Integration of Virtual Clusters onto Pragma Grid NAIST Nara, Japan Kevin Lam 06/28/13

Overview Grid computation has been used over the years to run large tests that would otherwise take a long period of time to complete. However, because each physical cluster (group of computers acting as a single unit) differed from the next, the results were inconsistent. Previous studies have shown that virtual machines (software version of a single computer) grouped into a virtual cluster would provide much more consistent results. By integrating the virtual cluster onto the pragma cloud, tasks such as virtual screening would be more efficient and have better results.

Week 1: Installation of OS and Creation of Virtual Machines Installation of Debian OS and Xen Hypervisor onto a laptop was done allowing for multiple OS synchronicity. Later, the realization was that the laptop would not support larger amounts of operating systems. Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) seemed to be a better alternative to Xen. The architecture is more straight forward. Installation of CentOS 6, which has native KVM support, onto a different computer was done. Four virtual machines with CentOS 6 were created. Bridging and network configurations were set. SSH server and clients were installed on the host and nodes. It is now possible to SSH from the host to nodes without passwords or IP-addresses. Open MPI was installed and configured for the cluster.

Future: Near and Nearer A machine file needs to be created for the MPI to recognize each node. Dock needs to be installed onto each virtual machine and configured so that it works for the cluster. Test runs need to be done in order to verify the clusters performance. We should look more into integrating our virtual cluster with NAIST’s cluster, PRAGMA cloud, and, possibly, Amazon E2.

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