[Beowulf] xCAT closing up shop

[Chris Samuel]

Hi all,

Sad to hear that the xCAT developers are moving on and having to call it 
a day:

https://sourceforge.net/p/xcat/mailman/xcat-user/thread/MW4PR15MB51826CAD47B7E44D0D808F01F7E4A%40MW4PR15MB5182.namprd15.prod.outlook.com/#msg37890495

> Mark Gurevich, Peter Wong, and I have been the primary xCAT maintainers for the past few years. This year, we have moved on to new roles unrelated to xCAT and can no longer continue to support the project. As a result, we plan to archive the project on December 1, 2023. xCAT 2.16.5, released on March 7, 2023, is our final planned release.
> 
> We would consider transitioning responsibility for the project to a new group of maintainers if members of the xCAT community can develop a viable proposal for future maintenance.
> 
> Thank you all for you support of the project over the past 20+ years.

I first came across xCAT in the mid-2000s when IBM brought Egan Ford to 
Melbourne to talk to folks from VPAC (where I was) and Monash Uni about 
it in light of a cluster that Monash had bought and we were going to 
help run.

The first system I brought up with it from scratch was at the start of 
2010 when I'd moved to VLSCI and was bringing up our first machine, an 
SGI Altix XE cluster. I was very pleasantly surprised to find that it 
didn't really care that it wasn't IBM hardware. :-)  We used it on the 
rest of our systems from then on, both for the HPC systems (IBM 
iDataplex's and for deploying all the LPARs needed to run and use our 
BlueGene/Q) as well as the infrastructure side (GPFS NSD servers and TSM 
servers for backup and HSM use).

I do seem to remember it took a bit of persuading to get the statelite 
configs to work with the iDataplex nodes that had Knights Corner Xeon 
Phi cards in them, but because it was open source and written in Perl we 
got it to work.

It'll be interesting to see if others do step up to keep it going, I 
know on the ACM SIGHPC SysPro Slack there's been some noises from folks 
who seem interested.

All the best,
Chris