PXE

Preboot Execution Environment (PXE) is a solution for bootstrapping a computer to boot off of a network interface card (NIC) rather then a local storage device. It has been standardized on by most NIC vendors and is used by Perceus to boot and provision nodes.

PXE became very prominent and considered standard for systems since about 2002. If your nodes are older then this, it is possible that they don't support PXE. It may still be possible to use Perceus utilizing Etherboot, but that hasn't been documented (yet).

Enabling PXE is different for many systems depending on their BIOS version, revision and hardware stack. In general you will want to enter the BIOS (usually pressing [F1], [F2], [F10], or [DEL] immediately at bootup). You may need to consult the motherboard manufacturer's user manual for details. Once at the BIOS configuration menus you will need to navigate to the boot order screen, and put the PXE devices above the local disk drives and under the floppy and CDROM (so you can boot locally for debugging if you need).

Keyboard errors

If you do not have a keyboard connected to the node you will want to ensure that the system will not error out on the keyboard probe. You will have to navigate a bit to find the configuration option but it will be well worth your time.

Hyperthreading

Most newer Intel CPU's offer a feature called Hyperthreading. It is a way of improving processor performance by doing threading at the hardware level and virtualizing multiple processors per core. Depending on the nature of the jobs to be run on this cluster, you may wish to disable this feature (for example this is detrimental for most HPC jobs).