Booting from USB or CD-ROM

Nodes should support booting from a USB 2.0-based flash key. For security, only use a USB key that has a physical write-protected switch (e.g., Imation Pivot Flash, TwinMOS Mobile Disk Z4, or other). However, if your system does not support USB booting or you cannot find a write-protect USB, then as a minimum it must also have a CD-ROM drive that supports bootable CDs.

Minimum Hardware Requirements

as of May 2011
good through June 2013

Nodes must meet minimum PCU, CPU, RAM, and storage requirements:

PCU	Built-in, remote-access power-reset capability, accessible from PLE, such as IntelAMT, HPiLO, DellRAC, IPMIv2, etc
CPU	4x Intel cores @ 2.4Ghz (e.g., quad core or 2x dual core) with HT and 8MByte cache. (Suggested CPU: up to 12 Intel cores).
RAM	4 GB (Suggested RAM: up to 48GByte)
Disk	Two disks, with a combined capacity of at least 500 GByte (Suggested disk capacity: up to 3 TByte)

At least two nodes must meet the configurations mentioned in the table above. More are better. If you do not know whether your hardware meets the minimum requirements, or whether it is supported by Linux, we strongly recommend purchasing one of the known working hardware configurations listed below: