Chapter 3. Installation
This chapter describes the installation of ParaStation5. At first, the prerequisites to use ParaStation5 are discussed. Next, the directory structure of all installed components is explained. Finally, the installation using RPM packages is described in detail.
Of course, the less automated the chosen way of installation is, the more possibilities of customization within the installation process occur. On the other hand even the most automated way of installation, the installation via RPM, will give a suitable result in most cases.
For a quick installation guide refer to Appendix A, Quick Installation Guide.
3.1. Prerequisites
In order to prepare a bunch of nodes for the installation of the ParaStation5 communication system, a few prerequisites have to be met.
Hardware
The cluster must have a homogeneous processor architecture, i.e. Intel IA32 and AMD IA32 can be used together, but not Intel IA32 and IA64 1. The supported processor architectures up to now are:
•i586: Intel IA32 (including AMD Athlon)
•ia64: Intel IA64
•x86_64: Intel EM64T and AMD64
•ppc: IBM Power4 and Power5
Furthermore the nodes need to be interconnected. In principle, ParaStation5 uses two different kinds of interconnects:
•At first a so called administration network which is used to handle all the administrative tasks that have to be dealt with within a cluster. Besides commonly used services like sharing of NFS partitions or NIS tables, on a ParaStation cluster, this also includes the
•Secondly a high speed interconnect is required in order to do high bandwidth, low latency communication within parallel applications. While historically this kind of communication is usually done using specialized highspeed networks like Myrinet, nowadays Gigabit Ethernet is a much cheaper and only slightly slower alternative. ParaStation5 currently supports Ethernet (Fast, Gigabit and 10G Ethernet), Myrinet, InfiniBand, QsNetII and Shared Memory.
If IP connections over the high speed interconnect are available, it is not required to really have two distinct networks. Instead it is possible to use one physical network for both tasks. IP connections are usually configured by default in the case of Ethernet. For other networks, particular measures have to be taken in order to enable IP over these interconnects.
1It is possible to spawn a ParaStation cluster across multiple processor architectures. The daemons will communicate with each other, but this is currently not a supported configuration. For more details, please contact
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