June 28, 2016 Cluster Management for Non-XSEDE Systems Barbara Hallock, Eric Coulter, Sudhakar Pamidighantam

Agenda Welcome and Introductions What is a cluster? Campus Bridging User Stories (and solutions) SEAGrid Questions / Discussion 2

Welcome and Introductions 3

Quick Poll Please respond to the poll, indicating whether you are on the IT side or the academic side of things at your institution (or other) 4

Quick Poll 2 Please respond to the poll, indicating whether or not you have current or planned access to a cluster at your institution 5

Quick Poll 3 Please indicate your level of familiarity with cluster technology. 6

What is a cluster? Many computers able to act as one on a single calculation Instead of many cores on the same machine, made of many machines networked together Ideally optimized for inter-machine communication 7

What is a cluster? 8 Image source: started.html

What is a cluster? We just covered hardware, what about software? Cluster administration – Rocks, XCAT, Warewulf Resource Manager/Job Scheduler – SGE, TORQUE+MAUI, SLURM Applications! – mostly HPC oriented 9

What’s the difference between HPC and HTC? HPC means High Performance Computing – “Painfully parallel” – lots of communication between processes – Large-scale simulations, “Scientific Computing”, MPI HTC means High Throughput Computing – “Pleasingly parallel” – little to no communication between processes – CERN, “Big Data”, Hadoop 10

What is a scheduler/resource manager? The pieces that make clusters work Provides awareness about what and where all users are running Prevents resource contention (Get off my lawn!) Shares available resource to users according to administrator policies 11

User Stories The following slides contain “user stories” that are generalized versions of common scenarios we work with in Campus Bridging efforts We will highlight user needs and show how different Campus Bridging resources can meet them in each case 12

User Story I We are a small institution of about 2,000 students, faculty, and staff. We recently received a grant that will allow us to put a cluster in our data center for the campus for everyone to share, but we don’t have room in the budget for costly support contracts or software licensing. It’s also important to us that our students be able to use it as a learning tool.

User Story I – CB Solutions The XSEDE National Integration Toolkit – XNIT – is a YUM repository that contains Open- Source packages Thanks to efforts by staff at Cornell University and funding from NSF, these packages are available at no cost, and can be used on any RPM-compatible cluster 14

XNIT Assembled to simplify the process of converting a "bare-bones" Linux cluster into a high-performance, parallel computing system that can be used to support scientific discovery Updates are packaged as soon as is feasible, which means less work to update a cluster utilizing XNIT 15

XNIT The base set of packages were selected because they are in use on XSEDE Service Providers (SPs) and have been found to be useful in the scientific computing context This means any skill sets picked up while using an XNIT package will translate to larger regional resources later, if needed 16

XNIT XNIT staff have also implemented packages by request from the community, so if there’s something you’d like to see that isn’t listed, let us know! Lots of the pre-installed software is in environment modules. Future XNIT packages will be available as modules, too. 17

Selected Application Categories Scientific Packages Compilers / Languages /Interpreters Linear Algebra /Libraries / MPI Implementation Visualization Utilities 18

Quick install demo repo.iu.xsede.org/xsederepo/readme.xsedere po repo.iu.xsede.org/xsederepo/readme.xsedere po 19

User Story II We are a growing computational department at the intersection of business analytics, math, and economics. We are trying to build a new program aimed at improving the computational education of our students and providing resources to the local community. We need to provide resources that are both easy to maintain and powerful enough to make a real difference for our users. We also aim to educate our researchers and students about resources available outside of our campus. 20

User Story II – CB Solutions The XSEDE Compatible Basic Cluster – Consists of the Rocks Cluster Manager plus a “roll” of open-source software available on XSEDE resources Simplifies the processes of building and maintaining a local cluster for admins with too much to do already Like XNIT, enables users to gain familiarity with the XSEDE “ecosystem” via XSEDE and bio rolls 21

XCBC Requirements Networking: – Static IP & hostname – At least a “dumb” switch for internal network – Two NIC’s on frontend, one on each compute node Hardware: – 1GB RAM – 30GB hard drive space – on frontend and compute nodes 22

XCBC – Easy to build! 23

XCBC – Easy to build! 24

XCBC – Easy to configure and manage! Schedulers: – SGE and TORQUE+MAUI available as rolls – SGE must be installed FROM THE BEGINNING – SGE will detect compute nodes; they must be added to TORQUE via /var/spool/torque/server_priv/nodes Users: – useradd + “rocks sync users” 25

XCBC – easy to manage 26 Rocks commands: – rocks list [host/interface/host attr/boot…] – rocks add/remove [roll/host attr/interface…] – rocks sync [users/config/…] – rocks run host [hostlist] “$command” – rocks [command] help Ganglia – Web-based monitoring system

XCBC: Caveat! Rocks currently supports only Centos 6.6 – Centos 7 Support is not predicted in the near future! – Security updates should continue be available, but this may not be ideal for production systems. Still an excellent tool for educational purposes Good community support with an active mailing list 27

Support and Consulting XSEDE Campus Bridging staff are also funded to travel in order to provide support and consulting with regards to campus bridging products at no cost to the host institution 28

SEAGrid Now, we’ll introduce Sudhakar Pamidighantam to talk about SEAGrid 29

Contact us Campus Bridging: (8a-5p Eastern time, M-F, except holidays) SEAGrid: 30