Setting up a high performance computing cluster on servers that run different OSs

Question

In my lab, we have several servers used for the simulation programs, but they worked independently. Now I want to combine them to become a cluster using MPICH to make them commu

Answer 1

It is not feasible to get this working properly. You should be able to get the same version of an MPI implementation manually installed on different distributions. They might even talk to each other properly. But as soon you try to run actual applications, with dynamic libraries, you will get into trouble with different versions of shared libraries, glibc etc. You will be tempted to link everything statically or build different binaries for the different distributions. At the end of the day, you will just chase one issue you run into after another.

As a side node, combining some servers together with MPI does not make a High Performance Computing cluster. For instance an HPC system has sophisticated high performance interconnects and a high performance parallel file system.

Also note that your typical HPC application is going to run poorly on heterogeneous hardware (as in each node has different CPU / memory configurations).