Building Your Own Super Computer - Building Windows Clusters
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Hardware
Before starting, you should have the following hardware and software:
- At least two computers with Windows NT, SP6 or Windows 2000 networked with some sort of LAN equipment (hub, switch etc.).
- Ensure during the Windows set up phase that TCP/IP, and NETBUI are installed, and that the network is started with all the network cards detected and the correct drivers installed.
We will call these two computers a Windows cluster. You now you need some sort of software that will help you to develop, deploy and execute applications over this cluster. This software is the core of what makes a Windows cluster possible.
Software
The Message Passing Interface (MPI) is an evolving de facto standard for supporting clustered computing based on message passing. There are several implementations of this standard.
In this article, we will use MPICH, which is freely available and you can download it here for Windows clustering, and find related documentation here . Please read the Quick Start.pdf and manual before starting the following steps.
Step 1: Download and unzip nt-mpich-1.3.0-a.zip into any folder (for example C:\NT-MPICH) and share this folder with write permission.
Step 2: Copy all files with the .dll extension from C:\NT-MPICH\lib to the C:\Windows\system32 folder.
Step 3: Install the Cluster Manager Service on each host you want to use for remote execution of MPI processes. For installation, start rcluma-install.bat (located in the C:\NT-MPICH\bin directory) by double-clicking from the local or network-drive. You must have administrator rights on the hosts to install this service.
Step 4: Follow step 1 and 2 for each node in the cluster (we will name each computer in the cluster as node).
Step 5: Now Start RexecShell (from folder C:\NT-MPICH\bin) by double-clicking it:
Open the configuration dialog by pressing F2. The distribution contains a precompiled example MPI program named cpi.exe (located in NT-MPICH/bin). Choose it as the actual program. Make sure that each host can reach cpi.exe at the specified path.
Choose ch_wsock as the active plug-in. Select the hosts to compute on. On the tab 'Account', enter your username, domain and password, which need to be valid on each host chosen. Press OK to confirm your selections. The Start Button (from the Window RexecShell) is now enabled and can be pressed to start cpi.exe on all chosen hosts. The output will be displayed in separate windows.
Congratulations -- your supercomputer (Windows cluster) is ready to run MPI programs!
Next: Building a Linux Cluster >>
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