Linux / HPC Server 2008 dual-boot

Posted By: Giovanni Marchetti | Dec 13th, 2007 @ 6:31 PM | 5,269 Views | 3 Comments

Formats:

How to Build a Dual-Boot
Linux / Windows HPC Server 2008
System
Draft
Giovanni Marchetti, Technical Evangelist, Microsoft, gmarchet@microsoft.com
Overview
This document illustrates the steps necessary to build a dual-boot Linux / Windows HPC Server 2008 solution. Although it is intended for use on HPC clusters, the techniques illustrated are applicable with little modiﬁcation to deployment systems based on Windows Deployment Services, which is used in HPC Server 2008. The procedure can be summarized in:
1.Verify the existing Linux disk layout.
2.If necessary, modify the existing Linux partitions to free space for Windows installation.
3.Install Windows.
4.Set the active boot partition so that the desired o/s is started at the next reboot.

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Tags: HPC, Linux

Rating:

neil

Great doc. I thought we had past the "Dual Boot" part of our industry and we were all into Virtualization.

What is the maximum number of boot partitions someone has had on a machine? 6 was my max with different flavours of NT and a Windows 95 image.

gmarchetti

Virtualization still takes too much of a toll, especially on i/o-intensive applications, to be considered for HPC. Message-passing applications are heavily dependent on network latency, which virtualization affects. Also, there is no way to virtualize low-latency adapters (like Infiniband).

There is however one scenario where virtualization could be applied: cycle stealing for non-mpi applications. When latency is not critical, we can imagine deploying a hypervisor on the servers, with a "day job" partition and a "compute node" partition. Resources would be allocated dynamically to those (e.g. on schedule), according to the workload requirements. If anybody is interested in this scenario, please drop us a line here.

Energy

Virtualization is welcome, I like one tiny tool easybcd, EasyBCD provides an advanced GUI that makes it relatively easy to modify the Windows Vista bootloader, allowing you to add and remove entries to it for dual booting with other versions of Windows, as well as Linux/BSD, Mac OS X and other operating systems.