PelicanHPC 2.1

PelicanHPC is a live CD that let's you set up a high performance computing cluster in a few minutes. The frontend node (either a real computer or a virtual machine) boots from the CD image. The compute nodes boot by PXE, using the frontend node as the server. All of the nodes of the cluster get their filesystems from the same CD image, so it is guaranteed that all nodes run the the same software. The CD image is created by running a single script, which takes advantage of the Debian Live infrastructure.

Pelican works very much like ParallelKnoppix, and is the continuation of that project. Thanks to Debian Live, Pelican is much easier to maintain and customize than is ParallelKnoppix.

PelicanHPC features:

• Pelican is created using Debian Live. To make your own version you only need live_helper and the make_pelican script, which is provided on the project's website.
• The LAM-MPI and OpenMPI implementations of MPI are installed. Both 32 and 64 bit versions are available. Debian testing (Lenny) is the base for both.
• You can use any Class C network you like. By default, the cluster is on 10.11.12.*
• xfce4 window manager, konqueror for browsing and file management, ksysguard for monitoring the cluster, kate and nano for editing. It is very easy to add packages. Pelican is a bare-bones framework for setting up a HPC cluster.