Homogeneous Cluster Nodes: All Cluster Nodes of the cluster are of the same CPU architecture and run the same kernel version. The Cluster Management Node may be of different CPU architecture and kernel version!

RPM support: The Linux distribution on the Cluster Nodes, the Cluster Management Node and the installation machine needs to support RPM or DEB packages. Both major distributions from Red Hat and (SUSE) use RPM packages.

Installed RPM packages: To build the Dolphin PCI Express software stack, a few RPM packages that are often not installed by default are required:

GUI support: for the initial installation, the installation machine should be able to run GUI application via X.

Disk space:

To build the eXpressWare RPM packages, about 500MB free disk space in the system's temporary directory (typically /tmp on Linux) are required on the kernel build machine and the Cluster Management Node.

To install eXpressWare on a Cluster Node; about 100MB free disk space is required for the installation directory (default /opt/DIS ).

Resolvable host names:

The nodes must have resolvable names associated with a network interface. Please note that the hostnames must not resolve to the loopback address for SuperSockets to work properly.

You can use ping to test the name resolution:

[root@XD1-CentOS7 ~]# ping -c 1 XD1-CentOS7
PING XD1-CentOS7 (192.168.1.30) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from XD1-CentOS7 (192.168.1.30): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.035 ms

--- XD1-CentOS7 ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms

	    

Password-less ssh-access

To use the eXpressWare installer (SIA) to install the software on all nodes, you need to enable password-less ssh-access to all systems from the Cluster Management Node (frontend). ' If you don't want to do this, you must manually install the software on each node using the --install-node option. The eXpressWare installer will ask if password-less ssh-access is enabled and offer to set it up during the installation process.

Firewall configuration

For centralized management of the PCIe network, the eXpressWare Network Manager must be able to communicate over Ethernet to the Node Manager running on each Cluster Node.

To allow this communication, you must ensure the Firewall on each Cluster Node allows incoming communication on TCP port 3443.

If you plan to utilize SuperSockets between Cluster Nodes, you need to disable the Firewall.

If you can't open the Firewall on the Cluster Nodes, you need to do a manual installation of eXpressWare on each node and distribute the configuration files yourself.

As an example, if you would like to disable the Firewall using RHEL/CentOS 7:

[root@XD1-CentOS7 ~]# systemctl stop firewalld
[root@XD1-CentOS7 ~]# iptables -L
Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT)
target     prot opt source               destination

Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT)
target     prot opt source               destination

Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT)
target     prot opt source               destination
	    

In order to permanently disable the firewall service, run the following command on all nodes:

[root@XD1-CentOS7 ~]# systemctl disable firewalld
Removed symlink /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/firewalld.service.
Removed symlink /etc/systemd/system/dbus-org.fedoraproject.FirewallD1.service.
	    

Disable SELinux: RHEL/Centos 7 enables the SELinux security extensions by default. They should be disabled since they cause problems with SuperSockets. To disable SELinux at runtime run the following command:

[root@XD1-CentOS7 ~]# setenforce 0
	    

In order to permanently disable SELinux edit the file /etc/sysconfig/selinux and change the line:

SELINUX=enforcing
	    

to

SELINUX=disabled
	    

Reboot for the changes to take effect.

dis_kosif: This service loads the kosif module which manages OS dependent functionality.

dis_ix: This service loads the dis_ix module which manages the IDT PCI Express hardware.

dis_px: This service loads the dis_px module which manages the PLX PCI Express hardware.

dis_mx: This service loads the dis_mx module which manages the Microchip PCI Express chip.

dis_irm: This service loads the dis_irm module which performs configuration, and session and resource management.

dis_sisci: This service loads the dis_sisci module which provides abstractions and mappings for the SISCI user-level API.

dis_supersockets: This service loads the dis_msq, dis_mbox and dis_ssocks modules which together provide the SuperSockets functionality.

dis_nodemgr: This service controls the node manager daemon.

dis_networkmgr (only on Cluster Management Node): This service controls the node manager daemon.