Systems/Enterprise:
OSCAR ANNOUNCE OPEN SOURCE GRID
CLUSTER TOOLKIT
This announcement follows the successful demonstration of version 2.0 at
the IEEE SuperComputing 2002 (SC2002) conference in Baltimore, MD.
The OSCAR toolkit is used to build, configure and manage grid clusters. Its
primary objective is to make use of "best practices" for grid cluster
high-performance Computing.
OSCAR enables a user to setup and maintain a grid cluster with the same
software typically found on HPC grid clusters, while greatly reducing the
complexity.
This marks the third consecutive year that OSCAR has been featured at
SuperComputing. In the year leading to SC2002, the toolkit has had several
significant additions including: packaging API with test harness, remote
package retrieval, node management, environment management, and extended
distribution support including IA-64.
The OSCAR Package API enables authors to add their own software to the
installation process. In addition, a set of scripts may be invoked to provide
package configuration outside of the RPM.
A remote package download tool, OSCAR Package Downloader (OPD), as well a
package selection facility have been added. Together these facilities enable
3rd party packages to be added without being directly included in the OSCAR
distribution. Once an OSCAR package is obtained from the remote location the
package selection can be tailored to a user's needs from within the OSCAR
Wizard GUI.
Node management has been enhanced to support the addition and deletion of
cluster nodes after the initial installation. This is performed through
the OSCAR Wizard GUI.
The Switcher tool provides a clean interface to manage environment at both
system and user levels throughout the cluster. This tool extends the existing
facility of Modules to enable persistent changes through a simple command line
interface. This allows system wide defaults, e.g. default MPI to use, to be
manipulated by users at their discretion. Additionally, Switcher ensures
environment consistency on both interactive and non-interactive shells (i.e.
rsh/ssh).
The 2.0 release offers support for RedHat 7.2 & 7.3, IA-32 and IA-64 and
Mandrake 8.2.
The OSCAR working group is a consortium of industry, academic and research
participants. Primary contributors are Bald Guy Software, Dell, IBM, Intel,
Indiana University (IU), Intel, MSC.Software, National Computational Science
Alliance (NCSA), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Sherbrooke
University. OSCAR is the product of the initial working group of the Open
Cluster Group (OCG). OCG is dedicated to making cluster computing practical.
These groups are open to anyone interested in participating.
At over 80,000 downloads to date (Dec 2002), OSCAR is the most popular
open source cluster HPC solution.
Related resources:
OSCAR Mailing Lists:
ORNL is a Department of Energy multiprogram research facility managed by
UT-Battelle. Research supported by the Mathematics, Information and
Computational Sciences Office, Office of Advanced Scientific Computing
Research, Office of Science, U. S. Department of Energy, under contract
No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with UT-Battelle, LLC.
|
