The Rocks Cluster Toolkit is quickly growing into the leading Linux-based cluster distribution. The first annual Supercomputing Birds of a Feather meeting for Rocks users and developers will serve as an important halfway point between annual Rocks All-Hands Meetings (a.k.a., Rocks-A-Palooza). Meet to discuss issues with members of the core Rocks development team from the San Diego Supercomputer Center, leading Rocks system administrators, and key leaders in bringing Rocks into the commercial space. Discussions will include new elements in recently released Rocks 4.2, Rocks Rolls, and feedback on the roadmap for the future of Rocks. While Rocks is known for making large-scale systems administration and management simple, a growing ecosystem of extensions are a big part of what makes Rocks a compelling solution in so many environments. In addition to general Rocks discussion, the panel will focus in on the recently released Viz Roll, tiled displays, and parallel rendering.

The Rocks toolkit uses a graph-based framework to describe the configuration of all node types (termed appliances) that make up a complete cluster. With hundreds of deployed clusters, our turnkey systems approach has shown to be quite easily adapted to different hardware and logical node configurations. However, the Rocks architecture and implementation contains a significant asymmetry: the graph definition of all appliance types except the initial frontend can be modified and extended by the end-user before installation. However, frontends can be modified only afterward by hands-on system administration. To address this administrative discontinuity between nodes and frontends, we describe the design and implementation of Rolls. First and foremost, Rolls provide both the architecture and mechanisms that enable the end-user to incrementally and programmatically modify the graph description for all appliance types. New functionality can be added and any Rocks-supplied software component can be overwritten or removed simply by inserting the desired Roll CD(s) at installation time. This symmetric approach to cluster construction has allowed us to shrink the core of the Rocks implementation while increasing flexibility for the end-user. Rolls are optional, automatically configured, cluster-aware software systems. Current add-ons include: scheduling systems (SGE, PBS), grid support (based on NSF Middleware Initiative), database support (DB2), Condor, integrity checking (Tripwire) and the Intel compiler. Community-specific Rolls can be and are developed by groups outside of the Rocks core development group.

Abstract High‐performance computing clusters (commodity hardware with low‐latency, high‐bandwidth interconnects) based on Linux are rapidly becoming the dominant computing platform for a wide range of scientific disciplines. Yet, straightforward software installation, maintenance, and health monitoring for large‐scale clusters has been a consistent and nagging problem for non‐cluster experts. The NPACI Rocks distribution takes a fresh perspective on management and installation of clusters to dramatically simplify software version tracking and cluster integration. NPACI Rocks incorporates the latest Red Hat distribution (including security patches) with additional cluster‐specific software. Using the identical software tools used to create the base distribution, users can customize and localize Rocks for their site. Strong adherence to widely‐used (de facto) tools allows Rocks to move with the rapid pace of Linux development. Version 2.2.1 of the toolkit is available for download and installation. Over 100 Rocks clusters have been built by non‐cluster experts at multiple institutions (residing in various countries) providing a peak aggregate of 2 TFLOPS of clustered computing. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Clusters have made the jump from lab prototypes to full-fledged production computing platforms. The number variety, and specialized configurations of these machines are increasing dramatically with 32-128 node clusters being commonplace in science labs. The evolving nature of the platform is to target generic PC hardware to specialized functions such as login, compute, Web server file server and a visualization engine. This is the logical extension to the standard login/compute dichotomy of traditional Beowulf clusters. Clearly, these specialized nodes (henceforth "cluster appliances") share an immense amount of common configuration and software. What is lacking in many clustering toolkits is the ability to share configuration across appliances and specific hardware (where it should be shared) and differentiate only where needed In the NPACI Rocks cluster distribution, we have developed a configuration infrastructure with well-defined inheritance properties that leverages and builds on de facto standards including: XML (with standard parsers), RedHat Kickstart, HTTP transport, CGI, SQL databases, and graph constructs to easily define cluster appliances. Our approach neither resorts to replication of configuration files nor does it require building a "golden" image reference. By relying on this descriptive and programmatic infrastructure and carefully demarking configuration information from the software packages (which is a bit delivery mechanism), we can easily handle the heterogeneity of appliances, easily deal with small hardware differences among particular instances of appliances (such as IDE vs. SCSI), and support large hardware differences (like /spl times/86 vs. IA64) with the same infrastructure. Our mechanism is easily extended to other descriptive infrastructures (such as Solaris Jumpstart as a backend target) and has been proven on over a 100 clusters (with significant hardware and configuration differences among these clusters).

High-performance computing clusters (commodity hardware with low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnects) based on Linux, are rapidly becoming the dominant computing platform for a wide range of scientific disciplines. Yet, straightforward software installation, maintenance, and health monitoring for large-scale clusters has been a consistent and nagging problem for non-cluster experts. The NPACI Rocks toolkit takes a fresh perspective on management and installation of clusters to dramatically simplify software version tracking, and cluster integration. The toolkit incorporates the latest Red Hat distribution (including security patches) with additional cluster-specific software. Using the identical software tools used to create the base distribution, users can customize and localize Rocks for their site. Strong adherence to widely-used (de facto) tools allows Rocks to move with the rapid pace of Linux development. Version 2.1 of the toolkit is available for download and installation. To date, 10 clusters spread among 5 institutions have been built using this toolkit.