You joke, but I actually did, sort of. I didn't do it myself, but at the
place I was working at at the time (~2000 or 2001) we built a 10-node
Linux cluster, and kickstarted it with a boot floppy containing the
kickstart . I can't remember if the rest of the OS was installed over
the network or from a CD in the local CD drive, but the nodes definitely
booted of a floppy and read the kickstart file from the floppy. The
physicists were very hands-on at the time, and they set this up
themselves, since they bought it with their budget, but I remember being
there when they were booting off a floppy, one node at a time.
USB was around at the time, but I don't think the small USB thumb drives
were available or common then. If they were available, I'm sure they
were still a lot more $$$ than a floppy disk, and I'm not so sure Linux
had good USB support back then. I don't remember USB thumb drives being
common until 2003 or 2004, and they were pretty pricey initially, about
$1/MB, IIRC
Prentice
On 03/10/2016 02:18 PM, Lux, Jim (337C) wrote:
Yeah, and you'll be telling stories about how you brought up your first cluster
using 3.5" floppies.
Jim Lux
(818)354-2075 (office)
(818)395-2714 (cell)
-----Original Message-----
From: Beowulf [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Prentice Bisbal
Sent: Thursday, March 10, 2016 10:49 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] [OT] MPI-haters
On 03/10/2016 01:34 PM, Jeff Becker wrote:
On 03/10/2016 10:32 AM, Prentice Bisbal wrote:
This list used to get A LOT more traffic. Not sure what happened over
the past few years. I miss the witty banter and information I used to
get from all that traffic, but I definitely don't miss Vincent.
:-)
It just occurred to me that if you know who Vincent or RGB is, you're probably
an old-timer on this list now.
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