Integrating a Windows HPC Server 2008 Cluster into a Linux Environment
< Go Back
This white paper provides an overview of a series of more-detailed documents that guide a Linux administrator through the process of introducing Windows HPC Server 2008 into a predominantly Linux-based cluster environment.
The paper begins by describing the installation and configuration of mixed Windows-based and Linux-based clusters, with the goal of making access to the Windows cluster from a Linux environment as transparent as possible to the cluster users. There are intermediate testing steps provided to ensure that each component in the system is working correctly before moving on. The white paper also documents the test-bed configuration that was used for the development of the more-detailed guides. IT administrators can use this test-bed configuration to set up identity management, uniform file access, and job submission for a number of different selected scenarios.
Next, the white paper gives general guidance for the installation and configuration of a Linux-based client system that can access the Windows-based cluster. Learn how to configure the workstation so that it can use single sign-on (SSO), the Active Directory Domain Services facility for authentication and authorization.
The paper then describes how to configure Samba and network file system (NFS) file shares on a Linux server so they will be accessible to a user in the Active Directory environment. This is helpful because many HPC environments use large storage systems to contain all of the data they are processing, rather than storing the data on the HPC cluster itself.
Finally, the whitepaper gives high-level guidance for integrating the Windows-based system into the scheduling environment of a Linux cluster. Using a Linux-based distributed resource management package such as the Sun Grid Engine, users can submit their workloads to a "manager" system, which can then transparently distribute individual jobs to either Linux-based clusters or the Windows-based cluster.
