Virtualization, High Performance Computing, Enterprise Computing
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To restart HPC Server 2008 specific processes on compute nodes using just Powershell:
$nodes = Get-HpcNode
$services = "HpcManagement", "HpcNodeManager", "msmpi"
foreach ($node in $nodes) {
foreach ($service in $services) {
(gwmi win32_service -filter "Name='$service'" -computername "$node").stopservice()
(gwmi win32_service -filter "Name='$service'" -computername "$node").startservice()
}
}
Interesting video showing how the massive online game EVE is using HPC Server 2008, part of the game is written in MPI according to the video:
Tags: HPC Server 2008
ILO is a management port on HP servers that allow you to power nodes on and off, obtain sensor information, and other useful management tasks. You can save a lot of time when trying to configure the ILO management port on HP cluster nodes by scripting the ILO configuration with HP tools.
At a high level, to automatically configure ILO you feed the HP hponcfg.exe tool XML fragments which automatically configure ILO to your specifications.
I typically like the ILO management port to be configured to use DHCP, set the ILO hostname to be
First, download the hponcfg.exe tool from the HP website and put it on a share accessible to the compute nodes.
The first item it to set all compute nodes to have the same ILO name and password. In this example, I will just set them to Administrator/Administrator ( obviously you will want to change that!)
To reset the password create a file named reset_pass.xml on a share accessible from the compute nodes with the following contents:
Then run this command to execute the password reset on all nodes, via clusrun or other mechanism ( psexec if you are not on HPC Server 2008):
Next, lets reset the ILO hostname to
Finally, lets enable SSH for ILO. Put the following contents in a file called ssh.xml, copy it to a share and run hponcfg /f ssh.xml via clusrun
For more information, read the extensive HP documentation and examples.
Tags: HPC Server 2008
Maya is a popular network renderer used for Hollywood movies and a variety of other applications. It can be used on clusters of workstations, as well as HPC Server 2008. While there is no native HPC Server 2008 integration as of this post, it is fairly straight-forward to integrate Maya’s mental ray renderer with some scripting.
The scripting language I chose was Perl, though any language you like will work. ( You can download Perl for Windows free from ActiveState).
Before you begin do the following:
1. set
on each compute node to the license server for Maya.
2. set the PATH to the Maya Mental Ray renderer, which by default is
.
3. Make sure the designers export to the “.mi” format which is the Mental Ray format.
4. Finally, make sure the designers are referencing resources using relative paths, and not hardcoded paths like c:\myresoure.img which will not exist at render time on the compute nodes.
The custom script I created called “render.pl” takes a few arguments , the job ( In .mi format, required for Mental Ray rendering), the start frame, the end frame, and the number of frames per job.
Each job (or task) takes a chunk of the frames and renders them to images/, the more nodes you have the more you can render in parallel to speed up the render job.
The script generates the HPC Server 2008 jobs based on the user input, ultimately calling the Maya Mental Ray renderer with
The advantage of using HPC Server 2008 for Maya is HPC Server 2008 has all the built in scheduling, job management, and job submission built in. In this case the cluster was being used for many other applications, so Maya was able to play nicely with the existing cluster.
Tags: HPC Server 2008
A common management task is to set an environment variable of some sort across a compute cluster.
To set an environment across the cluster, you can use cluscfg:
For example
Note this will apply only to batch jobs started with the Microsoft HPC scheduler, not to normal programs running outside of batch.
If you need to set a variable across all nodes, and need it to be referenced outside of user batch jobs, then do the following:
Select the nodes into the node management view and run the following command
This command will add this environement variable in the system of all the selected nodes (
)
For example:
Tags: HPC Server 2008
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