xCAT (Extreme Cloud Administration Toolkit) is

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

distributed computing Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems, defined as computer systems whose inter-communicating components are located on different networked computers. The components of a distributed system commu ...

management software developed by

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

, used for the deployment and

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 ...

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 ...

or AIX based clusters. In September 2023 the primary developers of xCAT said that they moved onto other roles and could no longer work on it, asking the community if anyone would like to take over, as otherwise they planned to end-of-life the project on December 1, 2023. A consortium of companies organized to take over the development, later releasing version 2.17.

Toolkit

xCAT can: * Create and manage diskless clusters * Install and manage many

cluster machines (physical or virtual) in parallel * Set up a high-performance computing software stack, including software for

batch job Computerized batch processing is a method of running software programs called jobs in batches automatically. While users are required to submit the jobs, no other interaction by the user is required to process the batch. Batches may automatically ...

submission, parallel libraries, and other software that is useful on a cluster *

Cloning Cloning is the process of producing individual organisms with identical genomes, either by natural or artificial means. In nature, some organisms produce clones through asexual reproduction; this reproduction of an organism by itself without ...

and

imaging Imaging is the representation or reproduction of an object's form; especially a visual representation (i.e., the formation of an image). Imaging technology is the application of materials and methods to create, preserve, or duplicate images. ...

Linux and Windows machines xCAT has specific features designed to take advantage of

hardware including: * Remote Power Control * Remote POST/

BIOS In computing, BIOS (, ; Basic Input/Output System, also known as the System BIOS, ROM BIOS, BIOS ROM or PC BIOS) is a type of firmware used to provide runtime services for operating systems and programs and to perform hardware initialization d ...

console * Serial over LAN functions * Hardware alerts and vitals provided via

SNMP Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is an Internet Standard protocol for collecting and organizing information about managed devices on IP networks and for modifying that information to change device behavior. Devices that typically su ...

and

email Electronic mail (usually shortened to email; alternatively hyphenated e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving Digital media, digital messages using electronics, electronic devices over a computer network. It was conceived in the ...

* Inventory and hardware management xCAT achieved recognition in June 2008 for having been used with the IBM Roadrunner, which set a computing speed record at that time. xCAT is the default systems management tool of the IBM Intelligent Cluster solution. xCAT is sometimes used by

Lenovo Lenovo Group Limited, trading as Lenovo ( , zh, c=联想, p=Liánxiǎng), is a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in designing, manufacturing, and marketing consumer electronics, personal computers, software, servers, conv ...

, along with their own deployment system, Confluent.

References

External links

xCAT Home Page

xCAT's documentation on ReadTheDocs
* {{SourceForge, xcat, xCAT (old releases)
xCAT on Github
Cluster computing Free software programmed in Perl Software using the Eclipse Public License IBM software