Articles January 25, 2005 at 11:27 am

GeoCenter’s Xserve Cluster Setup Guide

GeoCenter has deployed a new 100 node Xserve G5 cluster that will be used for running distributed processing applications from GeoCenter’s SeisUP� seismic processing system.

We have published information on our website describing the tools and techniques we used to setup and manage the cluster, including Radmind for managing system images, Apple’s Server Assistant for auto-configuring each node, and a number of custom Perl scripts written by GeoCenter developer Michael Beam. We also provide information regarding the differences between Mac OS X and other Unix platforms that we encountered while porting our code to Mac OS X. The techniques we developed allowed us to reduce the deployment process to a short process of booting each system from an external hard disk, which then imaged and auto-configured the system. All of these item have been packaged into one disk image (compressed .dmg) download available on our website.

The website can be found at:

http://www.geocenter.com/news/xserve_overview.html

Some of the information is still under development and will be updated soon. Please contact me for more information or any questions.

We are already seeing some pretty impressive results from the cluster and hope to provide some performance numbers in the near future.

Leave a reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.