One of the key components to manage an HPC Cluster is to have the right HPC Management software in place. This includes methods to deploy compute nodes, keep operating systems and other software up to date, and monitor the hardware. There are full Cluster Managers available. Some are free, including Aspen Systems’ Aspen Cluster Management Environment (ACME) software, and others come with commercial support and require a license. Then, there are different components you can use to create your own software stack. A lot of these tools are available as Open Source software.
The software stack is perhaps the most important part of your high performance computing solution. Starting with your choice of operating system, the software stack determines not only how your system operates, but also its performance.
Unlike most other HPC manufacturers, Aspen Systems offers a full selection of operating systems for you to choose from. Some OS’s are more user-friendly, while other may provide increased performance for your applications. You also may already be familiar with a particular Linux distribution, so sticking with it may be the best choice for you depending on the hardware selected.
Aspen offers a full selection of performance software options such as compiling your choice of MPIs and other software with as many compilers as you wish before your system ships. Aspen requires all customers to fill out our online Statement of Work (SOW).
Cluster HPC management and support is perhaps one of the most overlooked facets of operating a cluster. Two questions must be answered for your successful cluster deployment. What hardware and software capabilities will be installed on your cluster to facilitate successful HPC management and support; and what are your cluster management, warranty, and support options?
Aspen Systems Cluster Management software comes standard with all of our HPC Clusters, along with our Standard Service Package at no additional cost. Aspen Cluster HPC Management software is compatible with most Linux distributions and is supported for the life of the cluster.
Bright Computing is an industry leader in HPC middleware solutions, for provisioning and managing HPC clusters, Hadoop clusters, and OpenStack private clouds in your data center or in the cloud. Bright Cluster Manager, the flagship product of Bright Computing, makes it easy to deploy and manage big data and cloud architectures. Bright Cluster Manager makes Linux clusters easy to install, manage and use. In addition to ease of management, Bright Cluster Manager is designed to scale to thousands of nodes. The Bright Cluster Manager software solution is designed to be a complete HPC management solution and includes everything a user or system administrator would expect from an advanced cluster management software stack. Contact one of our expert sales engineers today to learn how the HPC solutions from Bright Computing can help you streamline the installation and management of your HPC system.
High-performance computing is driving new innovations across a wide range of industries — from biosciences, to finance, to cosmology and more. Intel HPC Orchestrator simplifies the installation, management, and ongoing maintenance of your system by reducing the amount of integration and validation effort required to run an HPC software stack. With Intel HPC Orchestrator, based on the OpenHPC system software stack, you can take advantage of the innovation driven by the open source community – while also getting peace of mind from Intel support across the entire stack. Accelerate your time to results and value for your HPC initiatives through Orchestrator.
Intel HPC Orchestrator, part of the Intel Scalable System Framework, reduces the burden of integrating and validating an HPC software stack and greatly simplifies ongoing maintenance and support. This video touches on Intel HPC Orchestrator proof of concepts with Fujitsu, ANSYS and COMSOL. It gives the software ecosystem the best of both worlds – community-driven innovation and the peace of mind of Intel expertise and support. Intel HPC Orchestrator is helping close the gap between hardware and software on the path to exascale performance.
Rocks is an open-source Linux cluster distribution that enables end users to easily build computational clusters, grid endpoints and visualization tiled-display walls. Hundreds of researchers from around the world have used Rocks to deploy their own cluster. With its role based package manager, deploying applications across the entire cluster is very easy and efficient.
The Rocks Cluster Distribution (originally called NPACI Rocks) is a popular open-source Linux cluster distribution based on CentOS, and sponsored by a National Science Foundation award. Rocks is a disked cluster deployment and management solution, and utilizes the concept of “rolls”, which are pre-configured sets of RedHat Package Manager (RPM) packages with specific changes made to integrate into a Rocks cluster. The Rocks goal is to simplify building a cluster, and it succeeds. However, Rocks, makes specific assumptions about how your cluster will be configured, and your cluster will be configured in that manner if it is to operate properly. Additionally rolls released by vendors or user groups, may be valid for only certain Rocks versions, and some rolls can conflict with other rolls, so some knowledge is necessary to successfully build and deploy a Rocks solution that fits your needs.
oneSIS is an open-source software package aimed at simplifying diskless cluster management. It is a simple and highly flexible method for deploying and managing a system image for diskless systems that can turn any supported Linux distribution into a master image capable of being used in a diskless environment. One image is sufficient for serving thousands of nodes. Functional groups of nodes are easy to define, and any single node or group of nodes can easily be configured to behave independently.
All node differences are defined in a central configuration file, providing unprecedented simplicity and clarity for system administrators. oneSIS can be used to manage diskless systems using NFS root, and potentially root over any other network filesystem or network storage system (such as iSCSI, iSER, SRP, Fiber Channel). It can be used to manage the root filesystem in any kind of diskless environment from desktops to high availability web servers to high performance compute clusters.
Warewulf is a scalable systems management suite originally developed to manage large high-performance Linux clusters. Focused on general scalable systems management, it includes a framework for system configuration, management, provisioning/installation, monitoring, event notification, and more via a modular plugin architecture. Install the components and features you need or leverage the existing system configurations stored within Warewulf to create custom solutions to meet your particular needs. Warewulf is a flexible solution that has proven itself to be scalable and easy to use.
xCAT offers complete management for HPC clusters, RenderFarms, Grids, WebFarms, Online Gaming Infrastructure, Clouds, Datacenters, and whatever tomorrow’s buzzwords may be. It is agile, extensible, and based on years of system administration best practices and experience.