Installation guide

Release Notes

Caution using beosetup

The /usr/sbin/beosetup utility is deprecated. At this time, we do not recommend using beosetup for observing or altering

the cluster state while new compute nodes are booting.

Caution using ethtool

ethtool -G may be used to set the network interface’s ring buffer size. Performing this action on an interface that uses the

forcedeth driver will cause that interface to stop working. Use ethtool -i interface-name to view the interface-name and

driver pairing.

Issues with port numbers

Scyld ClusterWare employs several daemons that execute in cooperating pairs: a server daemon that executes on the master

node, and a client daemon that executes on compute nodes. Each daemon pair communicates using tcp or udp through

a presumably unique port number. By default, Scyld ClusterWare uses ports 932 (beofs2), 933 (bproc), 3045 (beonss),

and 5545 (beostats). In the event that one or more of these port numbers collides with a non-Scyld ClusterWare daemon

using the same port number, the cluster administrator can override Scyld ClusterWare default port numbers to use differ-

ent, non-colliding unused ports using the /etc/beowulf/config ﬁle’s server directive. See man beowulf-conﬁg and

/etc/beowulf/config for a discussion of the server directive.

The ofﬁcial list of assigned ports and their associated services is http://www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers, and

/etc/services is a list shipped with your base distribution. However, the absence in either list of a speciﬁc port number

is no guarantee that the port will not be used by some software on your cluster. Use lsof -i :portNumber to determine if a

particular port number is in active use.

A common collision is with beofs2 port 932 or bproc port 933, since the rpc.statd or rpc.mountd daemons may ran-

domly grab either of those ports before Beowulf can grab them. However, Beowulf recognizes the conﬂict and tries al-

ternative ports until it ﬁnds an unused port. If this ﬂexible search causes problems with other daemons, you can edit

/etc/beowulf/config to specify a tentative override value using the server beofs2 or server bproc directive, as ap-

propriate.

Less common are collisions with beonss port 3045 or beostats port 5545. The server beonss and server beostats override

values are used as-speciﬁed and not adjusted by Beowulf at runtime.

Issues with OpenMPI

Scyld ClusterWare distributes a Scyld-repackaged release of the Open Source OpenMPI (http://www.open-mpi.org/: the

openmpi-scyld base package, plus several compiler-environment-speciﬁc packages: openmpi-scyld-gnu, openmpi-scyld-

intel, and openmpi-scyld-pgi. Each openmpi-scyld rpm carries a version number that matches the originating Open Source

OpenMPI version.

Beginning with openmpi-scyld version 1.5.1, Scyld ClusterWare installs the ﬁles into version-speciﬁc directories, which

allows multiple openmpi-scyld versions to co-exist on the master node. (See the Section called Upgrading Earlier

Release of Scyld ClusterWare to Scyld ClusterWare 4.9.0 step 7 and step 8 for how to install co-existing openmpi-scyld

releases.) The /opt/scyld/openmpi/version directory contains compiler subdirectories gnu, intel, and pgi, each

of which contain libraries, executable binaries, and manpages associated with that particular compiler. The directory

/opt/scyld/openmpi/version/examples contains source code examples.