Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

The Rocks way or the highway

By Bracken King

Over the past few years in graduate school, I've somehow ended up managing the computing resources for our lab. Prior to joining the lab, I didn't have any real system administration experience, so while I've learned a lot over these years, I'm still learning plenty whenever something breaks or we decided to upgrade our resources. As you might expect, there's a huge amount of complexity in managing a linux cluster, and one often has to just trust various suggestions at face value without fully understanding the underlying logic. Regardless, I always try to make a point of having at least some idea of why various best practices have been established. The following is a story about my not doing that, and the minor annoyance that it's causing.

About a year ago, we purchased 32 compute nodes for a new cluster. Even if you've never been in a server room before, you've probably seen one on TV (and in the picture included in this post). Basically, there are a bunch of metal racks lined up next to each other, and the computers are stacked on top of each other inside the racks. The racks in our lab can hold about 40 computers each. Cooled air is blown up from the floor in front of the computers, then pulled over the processors by fans inside the computers.

Anyway, when we bought these computers, the company from whom we purchased them came out to do the installation. As I said, we had purchased 32 machines and had room for 40 machines in the rack, so we were going to have 8 empty slots in the rack. I was a little surprised to see that the team installed the computers with all 8 empty spots placed at the top of the rack. When I asked about this, they told me that installing machines from the floor up is "The Rocks Way" (Rocks

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Tags: Using Technology, Best practices, System administration