MDCS - Discover Clusters Functionality

I have a small implementation of Microsoft HPC Server 2012 R2 running on a server 2012 R2 box. I have MDCS setup and working and validations pass when I run MATLAB on the head node. However, I am unable to discover the head node using the 'Discover Clusters' feature. This functionality will be crucial if we decide to deploy MDCS on our production network.

I'm curious how the head node is made discoverable to clients. Is this done via publishing details somewhere in Active Directory or DNS? If anyone is able to give me further details on the intricacies of discovery I can verify if the mechanism exists on our development network.

Many Thanks

Answer 1

[Elwin Chan]

Hi Peter,

We use an Active Directory search to locate the HPC Server head nodes, using the method described here . The details of the cluster should have been published in the Active Directory during the installation of the HPC Server product itself.

Which release of MATLAB are you using?

Thanks, Elwin

[Peter Wright]

Hi Elwin,

Thank you for your reply. We are currently trialing this with MATLAB 2014b. It hadn't occured to me that the HPC head node publishes itself in AD and MATLAB simply takes advantage of this. I had wrongly assumed this was an issue with the MDCS installation. We have a few caveats with our AD infrastructure as we have multiple domains and a non standard internal DNS server. So perhaps something has gone wrong here.

I know I'm about to ask a stupid question but here goes... The link you provided looks like exactly what I need to check our head node is published correctly in AD. If you could give me a pointer on how to run this I would be very grateful. Do I need to compile in in Visual Studio or am I overthinking this?

Thanks once again, and a happy new year!

Peter

[Elwin Chan]

Hi Peter,

Happy new year to you too. Yes, to run the code on that webpage, you would need to compile it in Visual Studio and them run the resulting exectuable. If you are familiar with powershell, you may be able to run equivalent code from inside a powershell script too. This blog posting from Microsoft's HPC Team shows you roughly how to do that.

Thanks, Elwin