HPCwire: Cluster Virtualization

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September 08, 2006

Cluster Virtualization

-- Revisiting Beowulf-Class Linux Cluster Architectures

, Director of Product Management

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The Road to Cluster Virtualization

As cluster use in enterprises grows, the need for commercial grade high performance computing that scales on-demand to adapt to ever-changing workload requirements and provide optimal system utilization is also growing. These needs in turn have driven many useful innovations. However, there has remained a fundamental assumption that a cluster or grid configuration is provisioned as a static, disk-based, full operating system installation on every single server.

This assumption leads to extensive scripting and middleware in an attempt to abstract out the complexity of managing hundreds or thousands of servers. In reality, this outdated approach only masks the complexity, without removing the underlying problem, and magnifies the operating costs of managing and maintaining large pools of servers. Rethinking these fundamental concepts can yield surprising results that can eliminate the very complexities many software "solutions" strive to merely camouflage. The key is Cluster Virtualization.

What is Cluster Virtualization? The term "virtualization" is a heavily used term these days, but the most common understanding of it is "to abstract the complexities of many -- presenting the simplicity of one". The result of Cluster Virtualization is the vastly simplified deployment and management of large pools of servers, accomplished by making very large groups of servers appear and act like a single system, as easy to manage as a single workstation. The financial and efficiency benefits of this approach are extremely compelling -- making Cluster Virtualization the most practical and cost-effective methodologies for reducing the complexity, cost and overall administrative burden of large scale computing -- enabling you to get the most out of your computing resources.

Today most clusters are based on the Beowulf design developed by Thomas Sterling and Donald Becker, chief technology officer at Penguin Computing, while the two were at NASA. A Beowulf cluster is a group of usually identical commercial off the shelf (COTS) computers running Linux and other open source software, to create a straightforward, scalable platform at from one tenth to one third the capital cost of traditional supercomputer.

What Becker realized, and what lead to the development of Cluster Virtualization architectures such as Scyld ClusterWare, was that while the original approach was straightforward and cost effective on the capital side, the complexity and operational costs grew in direct proportion to the size of the cluster. He found that by re-architecting the foundation of cluster software based on three basic principles, the complexity and thus the cost could be dramatically reduced. Those principles are:

Employing "stateless" (disk-less) provisioning.
Provisioning a lightweight compute operating environment.
Employing a single virtualized process space for the entire cluster.

Leveraging these architectural concepts has a tremendous ripple effect on rapid provisioning, manageability, scalability, security and reliability within the cluster. The result is an elegantly simple and powerful new paradigm for clustered computing, eliminating multiple levels of cost and support, while dramatically increasing efficiency and reducing operating costs to deliver a dependable HPC service to your organization.

Daring To Go "Diskless"

With the maturity of high speed networking and network booting mechanisms, along with the growing complexity of managing large pools of servers, the number of IT architects recognizing the benefits of "stateless provisioning" (i.e., direct to memory via a network boot) of the server operating environment is growing. The fact is that it is dramatically easier and faster to provision and manage large server pools when you simply decide never to install a full operating environment to the hard disks.

A full OS installation to the disk drive is relatively slow, generally taking 15 to 30 minutes to complete, depending on a variety of factors. Then there is often a considerable amount of hand configuration of services, user and remote access authentication that must happen after installation.

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