Cluster Computing:
CLUSTER-MIDDLEWARE PARASTATION GOES OPEN SOURCE
by Uwe Harms, Harms-Supercomputing-Consulting
The Munich-based company ParTec distributes its high-speed communication and
cluster management software. On November 5, there was a successful meeting at
Research Center Jülich at ZAM (Central Institute of Applied Mathematics) and
NIC (John von Neuman Institute for Computing) with other academic partners to
start a ParaStation Consortium. The first step will be to distribute a basic
version as open source, following the Sun Community License. Additional
services will be offered for commercial and industrial customers.
Based on research activities from Prof. Walter Tichy, University Karlsruhe,
ParTec offers its ParaStation worldwide and based on a license model. They
developed the ParaStation4 protocol, which circumvents the TCP stack and is
high-performing and efficient. Another aspect is the process management in big
clusters. It is, for example, possible to suspend running jobs and to start
those with higher priority. After they have finished, the administrator can
restart the old jobs. Another important task is to throw away the garbage of
crashed jobs and to offer a "fresh" cluster. Prof. Thomas Lippert, Head of ZAM
and NIC said, "ParTec developed an interesting software, whose future we have
to secure. We only can gain a broad effect by offering it as open source. I
don't know a comparable software with such a broad communication and
management spectrum." I think it might be possible that ParaStation supports
the communication and manages IBM's BlueGene!?
The Partners in The Consortium
ParTec, which renamed itself on November 5 to Cluster Competence Center (CCC)
GmbH, collected interesting partners, including the brain and developer of
ParaStation, Professor Walter Tichy of the University of Karlsruhe. He is
concerned with high productivity computing and is improving the programming
productivity of parallel algorithms. Research Center Jülich, ZAM and NIC, have
their HPC computing competence. Additionally, they will integrate grid
solutions into ParaStation like Unicore and Globus. With the University of
Wuppertal, Professor Frommer, a high-end user of a big cluster, ALiCEnext
(more than 1000 processors), enters the consortium. CCC itself is concerned
with the communications layer, the kernel adaption, supporting different
interconnects, bundling ParaStation with open source or commercial products
and realizing cluster projects from customers.
CCC's Business Model
In the past, ParTec licensed ParaStation, which sometimes hinders its broad
distribution. After a long time of brainstorming with developers, partners and
customers, the company decided to offer a basic version of ParaStation as an
open source with the source code. The licensing model is similar to the Sun
Community License. The open source version is not dedicated to commercial and
industrial users like OEMs, integrators or customers. For them, ParTec (CCC)
offers a service package, "Served Clustering" and no license. Here, the
customer can choose the level of services, starting with email service up to a
CCC employee sitting at the cluster site.
ParaStation and additional Open Source
ParTec (CCC) plans to bundle ParaStation for its customers with open source
and commercial software. This might be a parallel file system like PVFS or
Lustre, an integrated batch system like OpenPBS, an install and reinstall tool
like the Cluster Installation Suite from ALiCE/ALiCEnext in Wuppertal,
monitoring of the system, performance analysis, checkpoint/restart and other
tools which are helpful in a cluster environment.
Additionally ParTec (CCC) offers services for US cluster vendors. They have a
cooperation with PathScale, for example.
http://www.cluster-competence-center.com
|
