xCAT Cluster Management SW?

[Roger L. Smith]

On 9 Jan 2003, Bill Rankin wrote:

> Good morning everyone,
>
> Does any one have experience with the xCAT cluster management tools?
>
> http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/xCAT/
>
> (formally x-cat.org).
>
> I'd like to hear any opinions about usability for moderate sized beowulf
> clusters.

I just finished deploying xCAT across the 352 IBM nodes in our cluster.
I'd been running it on a test subset of the cluster for several months.

So far, I'm pretty happy with it.  I'm having a few scaling problems now
that I'm deployed across so many nodes (e.g., when I request for all of
the nodes to report their serial number all at once, several nodes will
fail to respond, but if I pick a smaller subset, say 32 nodes, all works
fine).  That said, I have a few things in my setup that are a bit
non-standard, so some of my scaling issues may be self-imposed.

I also converted all nodes to PXE boot, and allow xCAT to manage that and
the Kickstart process.  I have two words to describe that: "Pure bliss".

FYI, there is a mailing list dedicated to xCAT, but with the recent reorgs
of the xCAT distritution site, I'm not really sure how to subscribe to it
at the moment.

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| Roger L. Smith                        Phone: 662-325-3625               |
| Systems Administrator                 FAX:   662-325-7692               |
| roger at ERC.MsState.Edu                 http://WWW.ERC.MsState.Edu/~roger |
|                       Mississippi State University                      |
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