Table of Conents

1. Prerequisites
2. Download & Installation
3. Mendel Cluster Configuration
4. Stoarge & Querying

Setting Up Mendel

The following tutorial will get a Mendel cluster up and running.

Prerequisites

  • Mendel
  • Java 8
  • Apache Ant
  • Passwordless SSH

Passwordless SSH

Managing the cluster requires some form of passwordless login for any reasonably-sized installation.

In general, the best way to accomplish this is to generate a public and private SSH key pair, and then distribute the public key to machines in the cluster you wish to run storage nodes on. I would recommend using a password on your private key combined with ssh-agent to make life easier, although if you're on a secure installation you can probably skip the private key password. Either way, consult your operating system's documentation, or see Using ssh-agent with ssh by Mark A. Hershberger to get you up and running.

Download & Installation

Mendel can be downloaded from the downloads section of the website or by retrieving the most recent version pulling it from the project repositiory. The project is compressed in a zip file and must be unpacked first. In the example below, the project file Mendel-0.1.zip is used. Be sure to adjust the name to match the version of the file you have downloaded.

Mendel is compiled using Apache Ant build. Using the ant command from the installation directory will build the project.

Important!

Mendel requires Java 8. We highly reccomend Oracle Java 8. Mendel's configuration and start-up scripts (as well as Apache Ant builds) expect the $JAVA_HOME environment variable to point to the installed Java 8 JRE. This is particularly relevant if multiple versions of Java are installed!

$ unzip Mendel-0.1.zip
Archive:  Mendel-0.1.zip
   creating: Mendel-0.1/
   . . .
$ cd Mendel-0-1
$ ant
Buildfile: . . . /Mendel-0.1/build.xml
. . .
BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 5 seconds

The next section will go over how to configure your Mendel cluster.