8.4. Adding a Login Appliance to Your Cluster

A login appliance is a host that users use to build, launch and monitor their application(s). This host is a subset of a frontend appliance (a frontend runs several other services that are used to install and maintain all the nodes in the system).

First, we need to perform the initial installation of the login appliance. On the frontend, execute:

# insert-ethers

Select "Login" as the appliance type.

Then PXE boot the host that you want to be a login appliance.

Login hosts are generally hosts that also have a public network interface so users can directly access the login host. After the login appliance installs, to configure the public network interface on the login host, see Adding a public IP address to the second ethernet adapter on a compute node.

8.4.1. Making any Host a Submission and/or Execution Host

If you've installed a batch queueing system (e.g., by using the SGE Roll or Torque Roll), you can change any host in your system to be a submission host (a host where users can submit jobs) and/or an execution host (the queueing system schedules jobs on execution hosts).

By default, a login host is a submission host, but not an execution host. By default, a compute node is an execution host, but not a submission host.

To make a host a submission host (e.g., tile-0-0), on the frontend execute:

# rocks set host attr tile-0-0 submit_host true

Then reinstall tile-0-0.

To make a host an execution host (e.g., tile-0-0), on the frontend execute:

# rocks set host attr tile-0-0 exec_host true

Then reinstall tile-0-0.