[Etherboot-developers] Re: multicast

[Eric W B. <ebi...@ln...>]

Ronald G Minnich <rmi...@la...> writes:

> FYI, Erik hendriks (here) just REMOVED multicast support from his beoboot
> code. There were just enough problems with switches etc. that in the end
> he decided it was a net loss performance-wise.
> 
> This may or may not affect what you want to do with multicast.

We have to uses a full install, and booting.  For booting except
on a large system it isn't very significant as the files are generally
small.  For booting you start to notice a scalability limit somewhere
around 200+ nodes, at which point you need another server, patience or
multicast support.

For a full install multicast is very helpful.  For the MCR FSU (96
nodes) we can do a full install on all of the nodes in something like
twice the time it takes to do a full install on 1 node.  So about 10
minutes.   And I expect the numbers will hang in somewhere around
there for the whole cluster. 

Right now, getting work arounds for all of the hardware defects, and
LinuxBIOS bugs is the priority so we can reboot the FSU and have the
majority of the nodes come back up.

Eric