Advance Access published on May 25, 2006 doi:10.1093/comjnl/bxl020 An Abstract Interface for System Software on Large-Scale Clusters

Scalable management of distributed resources is one of the major challenges when building largescale clusters for high-performance computing. This task includes transparent fault tolerance, efficient deployment of resources and support for all the needs of parallel applications: parallel I/O, deterministic behavior and responsiveness. These challenges may seem daunting with commodity hardware and operating systems, since they were not designed to support a global, single network interface in the cluster interconnect to facilitate the implementation of a simple yet powerful global operating system. This system, which can be thought of as a coarse-grain SIMD operating system, can allow commodity clusters to grow to thousands of nodes, while still retaining the usability and performance of the single-node workstation