In the following chapters we will discuss how to start from scratch until you have a fully working HPC Cluster.
This starts by installing Debian on your sNow! server, typically named snow01. This server will have at least two network ports, one to connect to the internal sNow! network (192.168.0.0 in this document) and one to connect to your site network, which will be for users to interact with the computing cluster.
Debian installation
sNow! servers work over Debian. At the time of preparing this documentation it has been fully tested on Debian Stretch (v.9). Download Debian and install as follows: The partitioning on this installation is based in a system with a single disk OS and sNow!.
Boot from the Debian DVD or USB and choose Install.
- Select your language, location and keyboard map.
- Configure your primary network interface to have internet access as you will need it for installing sNow!
- Choose your hostname (snow01)
- Choose your domain name and a root password
- Create a user when prompted (snow user is reserved, so do not use snow as a username)
- Choose your timezone
- Choose manual partition, and create a small partition for
/boot, marking bootable flag as on/boot ext4 1GB - Create another partition and lvm rest of the disk
- Go to the Logical Volume Manager configuration and write changes to disk.
- Create a LVM Volume Group and call it: snow_vg
- Create the following LVM Logical Volumes:
root ext4 20GB / sNow ext4 150GB /sNow swap swap 8GBThis is just an example. You can choose other partition layouts that fit your needs but it is mandatory to have the snow_vg volume group and the /sNow filesystem.
- Configure a network mirror to install new software and updates when needed.
- Choose the default packages to install. You don’t need a GUI for sNow!.
- Reboot the system when the installation is finished.
Extend the repos with contrib and non-free
Edit /etc/apt/sources.list and add “contrib non-free” after each deb line.
deb http://ftp.es.debian.org/debian/ stretch main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.es.debian.org/debian/ stretch main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security stretch/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/debian-security stretch/updates main contrib non-free
# stretch-updates, previously known as 'volatile'
deb http://ftp.es.debian.org/debian/ stretch-updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.es.debian.org/debian/ stretch-updates main contrib non-free
Install pre-required software
Install the following packages, which are needed by the sNow! installation scripts:
apt install bridge-utils gawk lvm2 sudo wget git ca-certificates lsb-release git
External shared file system servers (home directory and /sNow folder)
If you are using an external NFS server or a cluster file system to share the home directory and the /sNow folder, then those file systems should be available before installing sNow!