Thread: So what is Platform Open Cluster Stack???

Originally posted by: bill, Thu Jan 25, 2007 4:47 pm

Hi All,

Platform Open Cluster Stack (OCS) is a whole collection of software and tools that can be used to create a 'beowulf cluster'. The current version of Platform OCS is based on the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) cluster toolkit and is compatible with 'Rolls' from that toolkit.

Platform OCS contains pretty much everything to setup a simple cluster in about an hour or two (if the cluster is large it will take longer). The software contains:

- Operating System (CentOS or RHEL)
- basic tools (OpenIPMI, etc.. should work)
- MPI (mpich, mpich-gm, mvapich, OpenMPI, etc...)
- Workload Management (Platform Lava - freeware, or Platform LSF HPC - costs money)
- Monitoring ( Ganglia, Clumon)
- Provisioning (PXE based install of nodes using Anaconda)
- Benchmark (hpl, bonnie, iozone, etc....)

There is other stuff but you get the idea. The CentOS version is free to download from http://my.platform.com if you are interested please download it and give it a try.....

I should point out though that Platform OCS is really intended for 'new clusters' not existing clusters - you'll understand what I mean when you look at it. Everything is packaged to build and get the cluster running and add components to it - so the configuration of tools etc is pre-packaged and it should work out of the box - so if you like to install everything yourself and prefer to tweak things constantly then Platform OCS is probably not for you....

We use it here at Platform to get a cluster up and running quickly so we can test new configurations/hardware MPI, etc... it makes it easier for us to do certain qa activities because if needed we can PXE boot and start from a 'clean slate'.