HPCwire: Flexibility is Key to Cluster Administration Software

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February 02, 2007

Flexibility is Key to Cluster Administration Software

by Bruce Potter and Jennifer Cranfill

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Introduction

When companies purchase a significant number of machines and cluster them together to solve their computing needs, their site environment often drives specific requirements for their clusters. These requirements vary and often include specific networking configurations, specific applications that need managing, specific approaches to software installation and maintenance, and existing management software and procedures that must be accommodated. The key to successful cluster administration software is that it be flexible enough to accommodate many of these environments. For optimum flexibility, the systems management software must have the following characteristics:

It must have some fundamental capabilities that can be used to accomplish a wide variety of tasks. These include capabilities like parallel command execution, configuration file management, and software maintenance.
The out-of-band hardware control must be extensible to support a wide variety of hardware.
It must support a variety of node installation methodologies, for example: direct installation using the native installer, cloning nodes, or running diskless nodes.
It must support a variety of networking configurations, including routers, firewalls, low bandwidth networks, and high security environments.
The monitoring capabilities must be configurable, extensible, and support standards.
The management software must have the proper APIs and command line interfaces necessary to support running it in a hierarchical fashion for very large clusters or subdivided clusters.
It must be modular and customizable so that it can be fit into companies' existing structures and processes (CLI, extensibility, use of isolated parts, etc.)
It must have mechanisms for allowing frequent updates and user contributions.

This article will discuss each of these characteristics in turn and give examples of cluster administration software that possesses these qualities.

Flexible Fundamental Capabilities

Cluster administration encompasses a wide variety of tasks that are often unique to the cluster or to the cluster's purpose. Therefore cluster management tools need to provide ways to accomplish many different tasks with simple tools. The more inherent flexibility in these tools the better. Basic functionality that is needed for cluster management includes:

Support for multiple distributions: Tools that work across multiple operating systems and architectures allow for greater use. While Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) are two of the main distributions for enterprise clusters, support for free distributions like Fedora, CentOS, Scientific Linux, and Debian is also desired by many cluster users.
Distributed command execution: A distributed shell is an essential clustering component, as it allows the administrator to quickly perform command line tasks across the entire cluster or a subset of nodes. This capability is a catch-all, because it allows the administrator to perform tasks that are not specifically supported by the rest of the administration software. Required flexibility includes timeout values (for nodes that are not responding), skipping of offline nodes, and the ability to use any underlying remote shell.
Distribution of files: Distribution of files comes in as a close second as an essential clustering capability. There are two modes of file distribution: one time copy, and a repository of files kept common throughout the cluster. The latter mode is useful for maintaining configuration files throughout the cluster or on a subset of nodes, and it can have increased flexibility by allowing different versions of files for different node groups, and by automatically running user-defined scripts before and after files are copied to the nodes.
Software maintenance: Software maintenance - the ability to upgrade and install software after a node is installed - is also important to enable administrators to install or upgrade individual applications without reinstalling the node. This feature must also automatically install prerequisite RPMs.

With the basic tools above it is possible to accomplish a large number of complex cluster tasks including installation and startup of the high performance computing (HPC) application stack, cluster wide user management, configuration and startup of services, and additions of nodes to workload queues. For instance, install and startup of HPC software can be done with software maintenance and the distributed shell. Configuration and startup of services like NTP and automounter, as well as user management, can be configured mainly through the distribution of configuration files from the management server.

Examples of cluster administration tools that include forms of the above functionality are: xCAT, the C3 tools in Oscar, Scali Manage, and CSM. Other tools can do just one of the tasks above. For example, Red Hat Network (up2date) and YUM provide software maintenance capabilities.

Extensible Hardware Control

Hardware Control provides the key capability of managing the cluster hardware (powering on/off, query, console, firmware flash) without having to be physically present with the hardware. Most cluster hardware provides native mechanisms to accomplish these tasks, but often the mechanisms vary between hardware types. This provides a challenging environment for remote hardware control software, since many clusters consist of heterogeneous hardware. Even if all the compute nodes are the same machine type there are still I/O nodes and non-node devices such as switches, SAN controllers, and terminal servers to be managed.

To support the ever growing number of power methods, the administration software must support user-defined power methods that can be plugged into the main power commands. A pluggable method allows the software to more easily support new hardware, and allows the user to run the same command to all the nodes and devices, despite their different control methods. It also allows other software components, such as installation, to drive the power control to the various hardware.

In addition to power control of the cluster hardware, remote console is another area that requires pluggable methods. There are a wide variety of terminal servers and serial over LAN (SOL) support on the market, and each of these has its own intricacies for establishing a remote console session to the node.

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