Hey Guys, I'm not sure if this is possible but to cut a long story short I have a new HP G7 Blade Chassis to build and test and was going to stress it for a couple of days to make sure it can handle itself. There are 12 blades in there at the moment, all with dual hex core Xeons so 144 cores / 288 threads @ 3.4ghz with 768GB RAM it needs to go live within the next week so don't have much time to test. I was thinking about making a quick basic Ubuntu 10.10 install, adding in the folding software and then making it a bootable ISO but I dont think this will be possible?? I just don't have time to install Ubuntu and configure them all so need a quick solution, any ideas? Cheers
Quickest solutions I know of: USB folding stick, download the files and edit the config: http://reilly.homeip.net/folding/usb.html or, the automatic folding@home CD generator: http://reilly.homeip.net/folding/cd.html Got this last one running on two machines and it's just works. Small possibility it might not support you NIC, but worth a try.
Download the latest Ubuntu Live 64bit image and put it on a USB stick (instructions are on their site) Boot it, see that it receives an IP address via DHCP (that's the easiest way). Otherwise, you'll have to enter one manually on each of the 12 blades once you boot them all. Download, install and configure f@h client. Edit the file /etc/rc.local to add before 'exit 0' the following: (edit path, executable name and -smp argument if needed) Code: cd /path-to-fah ./fah6 -smp -verbosity 9 < /dev/null > /dev/null 2>&1 & Make the /etc/rc.local file executable if it's not already. (sudo chmod a+x /etc/rc.local) Before multiplying this image, check that everything works fine and does not require user interaction. For this reboot, login after a few minutes and check CPU load (use 'top' command), temps, check f@h log, etc. If everything is ok, clone the stick to other 11. Stick them in each server, power them up and turn up the air conditioning. I wrote this pretty quickly, hope I didn't miss anything.
Never tried that Ubuntu solution before. Would be interesting to see which approach gets the higher PPD...
Thanks a lot for this mate but was hoping to avoid USB sticks, I was aiming for a bootable ISO which I can assign to the blades through the HP iLO remote control, will try what you said on a USB stick though and see if I can boot that through iLO instead One major problem is though - I've done some quick tests on a blade with windows 2008 r2 on but because we have a strict corporate proxy server I can't actually get to the outside world, just gets blocked every time Will have bit more of a play but dont think im going to be able to run some WU's on this beast which im gutted about so will just have to stress test them normally Cheers
Coola, explain in a bit of detail how that iLO works, and maybe we can avoid the need for 12 USB sticks. About the net connection, can you download/upload WUs from another computer, for example your workstation? If so, you can install a proxy on your workstation or use it as a router. Does your proxy prevent access to Stanford servers? If I remember correctly, the F@H client is capable of connecting through a proxy.
