What do you install first when building a BCM cluster?
Why B is the answer
The head node
The head node provisions the rest.
In detail
- The head node provisions everything else.
- Everything else follows from it.
Use case
An illustrative scenario, not a real incident.
A team installs the BCM head node first, because it provisions the others.
See it in different ways
flowchart LR A["Install head node"] --> B["Software images"] B --> C["Provision nodes"] C --> D["Set up Slurm or Kubernetes"] D --> E["Run workloads"]
sequenceDiagram participant H as Head node participant I as Software image participant C as Category participant N as Compute nodes H->>I: Holds the OS image I->>C: Assigned to a category C->>N: Nodes boot and provision H->>N: Updates when the image changes
flowchart LR S0["Head node"] --> S1["Software image"] --> S2["Compute nodes"]
Key point: The head node comes first.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. The monitoring dashboards
- Dashboards come later.
- C. Each compute node, by hand
- BCM provisions compute nodes for you.
- D. The Slurm controller, on a standalone host
- Slurm comes after the head node.