My first Windows HPC Cluster

#004 The virtual one

Last week I managed (had enough free time) to set up my first Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster 2003 Environment.

I endorse everybody thinking about building a HPC cluster on MS or non MS technology to try out the virtual approach.

First I installed a domain controller, than built the head node and installed two compute nodes on a single 64 bit machine with 4GB of RAM under Windows XP x64 and vmware workstation. To be exact, on my son’s game station.

For sure, it is not a high performance computer but still you can test every aspect of the platform. Installation, administration, management, application (OpenMP, MPI) development, parallel remote debugging, etc.

The installation was fun and went through smoothly when I figured out how to configure each NIC as I was configuring the most complex network topology. All the cluster nodes are with 3 NICs. One NIC is for public, one for private and one for the MPI network.

I was not using a DHCP server, so configured the NICs as follows.

Public network :
*192.168.0.X (255.555.555.0)
*Configured default gateway
*Configured DNS server

Management Network:
*10.0.0.X (255.555.555.0)
*No default gateway
*Configured DNS server (DC in my case)

MPI Network:
*10.0.0.X (255.555.555.0)
*No default gateway,
*Configured DNS server (DC in my case)