On a course on computer cluster configuration and administration

[EN] Computer clusters are today a cost-effective way of providing either high-performance and/or high-availability. The flexibility of their configuration aims to fit the needs of multiple environments, from small servers to SME and large Internet servers. For these reasons, their usage has expanded not only in academia but also in many companies. However, each environment needs a different ¿cluster flavour¿. High-performance and high-throughput computing are required in universities and research centres while high-performance service and high-availability are usually reserved to use in companies. Despite this fact, most university cluster computing courses continue to cover only high-performance computing, usually ignoring other possibilities. In this paper, a master-level course which attempts to fill this gap is discussed. It explores the different types of cluster computing as well as their functional basis, from a very practical point of view. As part of the teaching methodology, each student builds from scratch a computer cluster based on a virtualization tool. The entire process is designed to be scalable. The goal is to be able to apply it to an actual computer cluster with a larger number of nodes, such as those the students may subsequently encounter in their professional life.This work was supported in part by the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad (MINECO) and by FEDER funds under Grant TIN2015-66972-C5-1-R.López Rodríguez, PJ.; Baydal Cardona, ME. (2017). On a course on computer cluster configuration and administration. Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing. 105:127-137. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpdc.2017.01.009S12713710

Parallel Computing on a PC Cluster

The tremendous advance in computer technology in the past decade has made it possible to achieve the performance of a supercomputer on a very small budget. We have built a multi-CPU cluster of Pentium PC capable of parallel computations using the Message Passing Interface (MPI). We will discuss the configuration, performance, and application of the cluster to our work in physics.Comment: 3 pages, uses Latex and aipproc.cl

Reproducible and User-Controlled Software Environments in HPC with Guix

Support teams of high-performance computing (HPC) systems often find themselves between a rock and a hard place: on one hand, they understandably administrate these large systems in a conservative way, but on the other hand, they try to satisfy their users by deploying up-to-date tool chains as well as libraries and scientific software. HPC system users often have no guarantee that they will be able to reproduce results at a later point in time, even on the same system-software may have been upgraded, removed, or recompiled under their feet, and they have little hope of being able to reproduce the same software environment elsewhere. We present GNU Guix and the functional package management paradigm and show how it can improve reproducibility and sharing among researchers with representative use cases.Comment: 2nd International Workshop on Reproducibility in Parallel Computing (RepPar), Aug 2015, Vienne, Austria. http://reppar.org

Configuration Tools: Working Together

Since the LISA conferences began, the character of a typical ‘‘large installation’ ’ has changed greatly. Most large sites tended to consist of a comparatively small number of handcrafted ‘‘servers’ ’ supporting a larger number of very similar ‘‘clients’ ’ (which would usually be configured with the aid of some automatic tool). A modern large site involves a more complex mesh of services, often with demanding requirements for completely automatic reconfiguration of entire services to provide fault-tolerance. As these changes have happened however, the tools available to provide configuration management for a site have not evolved to keep pace with these new challenges. This paper looks at some of the reasons why configuration tools have failed to move forward, and presents some suggestions for enabling the state of the art to advance. Background and Motivation Configuration Tools have been an important theme at LISA for many years, and most conferences include one or more papers in this area. Despite increasing recognition of the importance of the configuratio