Rocks v4.2 Beta is Released
Rocks v4.2 Beta is released for i386 and x86_64 CPU architectures.
Download
i386
- base, bio, ganglia, hpc, java, sge, web-server meta roll
- kernel roll (bootable)
- OS roll - disk 1
- OS roll - disk 2
- MD5 Checksums
x86_64
- base, bio, ganglia, hpc, java, sge, web-server meta roll
- kernel roll (bootable)
- OS roll - disk 1
- OS roll - disk 2
- MD5 Checksums
Quick Start
- Boot your frontend with the kernel roll.
- At the top-right of the first user screen, click 'CD-based roll'
- Then supply the base+bio+ganglia+hpc+java+sge+web-server meta roll
- Repeat steps 2 and 3 for the kernel roll, OS roll disk 1, and OS roll disk 2.
- Then click 'Done'
The remainder of the install has the same general flavor of a Rocks 4.1 install.
New Features
- Beta Release of Bioinformatics Roll
- Graphical Installer
The Bio roll contains tools and utilities to facilitate Bioinformatics computation. Included tools: Blast from NCBI, MPI-blast from LANL, EMBOSS, hmmer, etc, along with programming utilities such as Biopython and Bioperl.
The frontend and compute nodes now utilize Red Hat's graphical mode of the anaconda installer.
Enhancements
- OS Roll based on CentOS release 4/update 3 and all updates as of June 28 2006.
- Updated SGE roll to SGE 6 update 8.
- Included tentakel as a cluster-fork alternative.
- Auto partitioning now creates a /var file system to protect the frontend against services that log many messages and fill up the root file system.
Bug Fixes
- ganglia no longer logs all errors /var/log/messages. This addresses a web-based usage mode of ganglia that sends frequent error messages to /var/log/messages.
- Can once again access MySQL database via frontend's web site.
- Can once again print labels for cluster nodes via frontend's web site.
- In SGE Roll, included configuration code to cleanup MPI programs after user executes a 'qdel' command.
- Now using native 'useradd' command. This address the issue useradd breaking when up2date refreshes the 'shadow-utils' RPM.
- The '--ghost' flag was removed from autofs.
- Permissions for the directories that hold the rolls are now always set to 755 every time rocks-dist is run.
- During a compute node installation, if the compute node is connected to a public network (e.g., eth1) and if that public network has a DHPC server, the compute node will now ignore that DHCP server and continue to send DHCP requests until it hears from a rocks frontend.
Known Issues
- To add a user to the cluster, you must run:
- useradd <username>
- rocks-user-sync
- tentakel '411get --all'
We're investigating why the new user information is not sent to the compute nodes.
- Using 'central.rocksclusters.org' for frontend central installations does not work.