Commercial Scale-Out is a new research project at IBM Research. Its main goal is to investigate and
develop technologies for the use of large scale parallelism in commercial applications, eventually leading to a commercial supercomputer. The project leverages and explores the features of IBM’s BladeCenter family of products. A significant challenge in using a large cluster of servers is the installation and provisioning of the base operating system in those servers. Compounding this problem is the issue of maintenance of the software image in each server after its provisioning. This paper describes the system we developed to manage the installation, provisioning, and maintenance process for a cluster of blades. The system leverages the management facilitation features of BladeCenter, and exploits the network and storage architecture of the Commercial Scale-Out prototype cluster. It uses a single shared root filesystem image to reduce management complexity, and completely automates the process of bringing a new blade into the cluster upon its insertion into a BladeCenter chassis.
By: David Daly; Jong Hyuk Choi; José E. Moreira; Amos P. Waterland
Published in: RC24150 in 2007
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