Warewulf is a

computer cluster A computer cluster is a set of computers that work together so that they can be viewed as a single system. Unlike grid computers, computer clusters have each node set to perform the same task, controlled and scheduled by software. The newes ...

implementation Implementation is the realization of an application, execution of a plan, idea, scientific modelling, model, design, specification, Standardization, standard, algorithm, policy, or the Management, administration or management of a process or Goal ...

toolkit A toolkit is an assembly of tools; set of basic building units for user interfaces. The word toolkit may refer to: * Abstract Window Toolkit * Accessibility Toolkit * Adventure Game Toolkit * B-Toolkit * Cheminformatics toolkits * Dojo Toolk ...

that facilitates the process of installing a

cluster may refer to: Science and technology Astronomy * Cluster (spacecraft), constellation of four European Space Agency spacecraft * Cluster II (spacecraft), a European Space Agency mission to study the magnetosphere * Asteroid cluster, a small ...

and long term

administration Administration may refer to: Management of organizations * Management, the act of directing people towards accomplishing a goal: the process of dealing with or controlling things or people. ** Administrative assistant, traditionally known as a se ...

Toolkit

Warewulf does this by changing the administration paradigm to make all of the

slave Slavery is the ownership of a person as property, especially in regards to their labour. Slavery typically involves compulsory work, with the slave's location of work and residence dictated by the party that holds them in bondage. Enslavemen ...

node In general, a node is a localized swelling (a "knot") or a point of intersection (a vertex). Node may refer to: In mathematics * Vertex (graph theory), a vertex in a mathematical graph *Vertex (geometry), a point where two or more curves, lines ...

file systems manageable from one point, and automate the distribution of the node file system during node boot. It allows a central administration model for all slave nodes and includes the tools needed to build configuration files, monitor, and control the nodes. It is totally customizable and can be adapted to just about any type of cluster. From the software administration perspective it does not make much difference if you are running 2 nodes or 500 nodes. The procedure is still the same, which is why Warewulf is scalable from the admins perspective. Also, because it uses a standard chroot'able file system for every node, it is extremely configurable and lends itself to custom environments very easily. While Warewulf was designed to be a

high-performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) is the use of supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into ...

(HPC) system, it is not an HPC system in itself. Warewulf is more along the lines of a distributed

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

distribution, or more specifically a system for replicating and managing small, lightweight Linux systems from one master. Using Warewulf, HPC packages such as LAM/MPI/

MPICH MPICH, formerly known as MPICH2, is a freely available, portable implementation of MPI, a standard for message-passing for distributed-memory applications used in parallel computing. MPICH is Free and open source software with some public domain c ...

Sun Grid Engine Oracle Grid Engine, previously known as Sun Grid Engine (SGE), CODINE (Computing in Distributed Networked Environments) or GRD (Global Resource Director), was a grid computing computer cluster software system (otherwise known as a batch-queuing ...

, PVM, etc. can be easily deployed throughout the cluster. Warewulf solves the problem of slave node management rather than being a strict HPC specific system (even though it was designed with HPC in mind). Because of this it is as flexible as a home grown cluster, but administratively scales very well. As a result of this flexibility and ease of customization, Warewulf has been used not only on production HPC implementations, but also development systems like KASY0 (the first system to break the one hundred dollar per

GFLOPS Floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measu ...

barrier), and non HPC systems such as

web server A web server is computer software and underlying Computer hardware, hardware that accepts requests via Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, co ...

cluster farms,

intrusion detection An intrusion detection system (IDS) is a device or software application that monitors a network or systems for malicious activity or policy violations. Any intrusion activity or violation is typically either reported to an administrator or collec ...

clusters, and

high-availability cluster In computing, high-availability clusters (HA clusters) or fail-over clusters are groups of computers that support server applications that can be reliably utilized with a minimum amount of down-time. They operate by using high availability sof ...

References

External links

Warewulf Project

Warewulf on Github

Admin Magazine: Warewulf Cluster Manager – Howlingly Great

Admin Magazine: Warewulf Cluster Manager – Part 2

Admin Magazine: Warewulf Cluster Manager – Part 3

Admin Magazine: Warewulf Cluster Manager – Part 4

Admin Magazine: Warewulf Cluster Manager Listings 1-6

General Warewulf Discussions

Warewulf Development Discussions

Perceus
{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070416220700/http://www.perceus.org/ , date=2007-04-16 Cluster computing

Toolkit

See also

References

External links