Scalable cluster administration - Chiba City I approach and lessons learned.

Conference · Mon Jul 01 04:00:00 EDT 2002

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/CLUSTR.2002.1137749· OSTI ID:801648

Navarro, J P; Evard, R; Nurmi, D; Desai, N

Systems administrators of large clusters often need to perform the same administrative activity hundreds or thousands of times. Often such activities are time-consuming, especially the tasks of installing and maintaining software. By combining network services such as DHCP, TFTP, FTP, HTTP, and NFS with remote hardware control, cluster administrators can automate all administrative tasks. Scalable cluster administration addresses the following challenge: What systems design techniques can cluster builders use to automate cluster administration on very large clusters? We describe the approach used in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory on Chiba City I, a 314-node Linux cluster; and we analyze the scalability, flexibility, and reliability benefits and limitations from that approach.

• Research Organization: Argonne National Lab., IL (US)
• Sponsoring Organization: US Department of Energy (US)
• DOE Contract Number: W-31109-ENG-38
• OSTI ID: 801648
• Report Number(s): ANL/MCS/CP-108094
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
AUTOMATION
COMPUTERS
DESIGN
FLEXIBILITY
MEMORY MANAGEMENT
RELIABILITY