Changes between Version 1 and Version 2 of Internal/CustomBIOS


Ignore:
Timestamp:
Sep 28, 2006, 12:34:51 AM (18 years ago)
Author:
anonymous
Comment:

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  • Internal/CustomBIOS

    v1 v2  
    33= Justification =
    44
    5 LinuxBIOS looks like a good bet for ORBIT, if we can port it to the ORBIT node hardware.  In theory, we have enough documentation of the ORBIT node hardware to do this.  LinuxBIOS will make our node imaging process far more streamlined in the following ways:
     5LinuxBIOS looks like a good bet for ORBIT, if we can port it to the ORBIT node hardware.  In theory, we have enough documentation of the ORBIT node hardware to do this.  LinuxBIOS will improve our node boot/imaging process in the following ways:
    66
    771. It is relatively difficult to service 400 simultaneous DHCP requests with our network infrastructure.  There are COTS solutions, but these are overfeatured and therefore unreasonably expensive.  Observing that every node gets the same answer from the DHCP server for every request it sends (based upon its position in the grid), it would be possible to eliminate the DHCP step entirely and going straight to image download if we could pre-program nodes with their basic network identity by running our own BIOS.
    … …  
    1515= Potential Problems =
    1616
    17 To upgrade the firmware on every ORBIT node will take a significant amount of time.  It will also mean calibrating the nodes (?).  However, the process of updating firmware and calibrating the radios can be done by a documented procedure and (relatively) unskilled labor.  We estimate the ORBIT community can tolerate a day or two in which the grid is not available.
     17To upgrade the firmware on every ORBIT node will take a significant amount of time.  It will also mean calibrating the nodes (?).  However, the process of updating firmware and calibrating the radios can be done by a documented procedure and (relatively) unskilled labor.  We estimate the ORBIT community can tolerate a day or two in which the grid is not available, if it is planned well in advance.
    1818
    1919LinuxBIOS may be worse than what we have now.  There is a chance we won't discover how much worse until the whole grid is reprogrammed.
     20
     21Does altering the BIOS count against reproducing an experiment?