1. Introduction to Clusters, Rocks, and MPI
Dany Guevara
David Villegas
Spring 2007
Florida International University

2. Acknowledgments
This presentation is a compilation of slides from selected material presented at Rocks-A-Palooza II - May 2006, Singapore.
Additionally, contents from the following sources were used:
Wikipedia
Globus alliance
Ian Foster – A Globus Primer

7. What type of cluster are we going to build?
a) Highly Available
b) Visualization Cluster
c) Computing Cluster

22. Live Installation of Rocks
Boot the frontend node by inserting the Kernel CD.

38. Installation of Compute Nodes
Log into Frontend node as root
At the command line run:
> insert-ethers

41. Installation of Compute Nodes
Turn on the compute node
Insert CD
Reboot and make sure to boot off CD

42. Which CD is needed to boot?
a.) OS Roll – Disk 1
b.) Kernel Roll
c.) Service Pack Roll

46. Okay, we have Rocks installed. Now what?
Let's write, compile, and run a parallel program. But first, let's take a closer look at Rocks.

47. What Linux distribution is Rocks based on?

64. Parallel Code
Now, let's focus on how to write a parallel application.

78. I'm a scientist interesting in parallel computing
I'm a scientist interesting in parallel computing. I have a large amounts of data, little time, and little programming experience. In the rare event of hardware failure, I'm willing to restart the application since a restart isn't life-threatening. What communication layer should I use for my application?
a.) Sockets
b.) Message Passing Interface (MPI)
c.) Parallel Virtual Machines (PVM)

86. Let's log into gcb.fiu.edu and create and build a MPI hello.c program.