As an example, these notes describe an installation with 4 slave nodes that have 200mhz Pentium MMX processors, and one master with a 166mhz Pentium cpu. All nodes have 32meg of RAM and a Tbase10 network interface, with a second NIC added to the master node. The slave nodes each have a 1G IDE hard disk, while the master node has a 6G IDE hard disk. PVM is installed on all the nodes under / usr / local / pvm3. For PVM applications to work, the source catalog and application executables must be available on all nodes employing the same trail. Because of this, home directories are placed in a new file system on the master node ( / home in this example ) which is exported to all the other nodes.
The amd program ( BSD's automounter ) is employed to mount the home list on a slave node as needed. The master node also provides NIS service supplying the password and group files to the cluster as well as the automounter map ( / etc / amd.home in this example ). Each slave node is an NIS slave which can only bind to the master node.
This permits a user to be added to the cluster by making an account on the master, and adding that user to the NIS map files. There is not any obligation the slave nodes have any user-specific info on them, so changing the membership of slave nodes in the cluster is easier.