Headless install of Jacket HPC (JKT-3152)

[acerj]

Is a headless install of Jacket possible on linux?

We've purchased a license for Jacket HPC to run on an existing 15 node cluster with 60 total GPUs. Since we were told Jacket HPC only runs on Linux we had to wait until we could take the cluster down for maintenance to convert to a Rocks 5.4.3 based linux installation. Since Rocks is designed to automate the install of the nodes, a headless install of Jacket would greatly simplify our deployment of Jacket HPC.

For that matter is the daemon for Jacket HPC installed alongside normal Jacket or is the current version the one available on the wiki?

Thanks,

Alex

[pavanky]

Hi Alex,

Jacket can be installed from command line very easily. You could also install it on a single drive and share it across multiple machines using nfs or other network sharing options.

However to *run* jacket in headless mode, the gpu's have to be *woken up*. The gpus are usually woken up when the X is started.
If starting X is not an option for you, you can run the following script at boot time (perhaps run it from /etc/rc.local)

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash

/sbin/modprobe nvidia

if [ "$?" -eq 0 ]; then
  # Count the number of NVIDIA controllers found.
  N3D=`lspci | grep -i NVIDIA | grep "3D controller" | wc -l`
  NVGA=`lspci | grep -i NVIDIA | grep "VGA compatible controller" | wc -l`

  N=`expr $N3D + $NVGA - 1`
  for i in `seq 0 $N`; do
    mknod -m 666 /dev/nvidia$i c 195 $i
  done

  mknod -m 666 /dev/nvidiactl c 195 255

else
  exit 1
fi


The daemon for jacket HPC should be available with the regular Jacket installation too.

[acerj]

The information about waking up the GPUs is very good information, and will be very useful.

However, I'm not sure you answered my first question. I have installed Jacket on linux before, and as you said, it is a very easy install from the command line. But it is an interactive installer. For my application, a non interactive install is what I am looking for. For example, with MATLAB it is possible to use a headless install file that specifies all options, to completely automate the install with no human input required. Do you have the capability in the Jacket installer to do this?

For a cluster installation, that would be preferable. We use Rocks, and can build in the installation (if an automated installation is possible) into our node configuration scripts, making our lives much easier.

Thanks,

Alex

[malcolm]

Hi Alex,
We tried scripting it so you could pass in the query answers to the Jacket-linux*.run file, but this didn't work out of the box due to internal issues with the installer.

As a workaround for now, I would suggest installing on one machine and then copying to all the other nodes (rsync, scp, ..).

This is a request we've had before, so it's been queued up as a feature request (JKT-3152) and we'll post here when ready.

Thanks for your patience,
James

[acerj]

Thanks for the reply.

Copying the install via an rsync or similar should be okay for now, since we can script that as part of the node installs. So just to clarify, copying the entire installation directory from one node to the rest should not cause a problem with Jacket HPC, right? I am assuming that there are no other configuration files or things that need to be touched, modified, etc.

Thanks,

Alex

[malcolm]

All the nodes will have the same config. The license file setup will be the same on each node (either use environment variables LM_LICENSE_FILE/LM_LICENSE_PATH or save in jacket/engine/jlicense.dat).