OSCAR Symposium – Quebec City, Canada – June 2008 Proposal for Modifications to the OSCAR Architecture to Address Challenges in Distributed System Management Geoffroy Vallée (ORNL) ‏ Thomas Naughton (ORNL) ‏ Stephen L. Scott (ORNL) ‏

OSCAR 2008 – Quebec City, Canada - 2 Context  OSCAR initially has been designed for Beowulf clusters  a single head-node hosting all distributed services  a set of compute nodes  GUI based (a CLI is under development but still unstable)‏  OSCAR use cases by the System Research ORNL  Deployment of system-level virtualization prototypes  Deployment of fault tolerance prototypes  Different Linux distributions  Remote connection  Use to have “UNIX-like tools”

OSCAR 2008 – Quebec City, Canada - 3 Current OSCAR Architecture

OSCAR 2008 – Quebec City, Canada - 4 Advantages & Limitations of the Current Implementation  Advantages  Extensible (support of many Linux distributions)‏  Wizard-based GUI  Limitations  No possible to extend system partitioning: e.g., I/O versus login nodes  Difficult to extend the current GUI: no separation of the GUI code from the “core code”  Difficult to support system-level virtualization  No fully-featured CLI, no UNIX-like UI  No integrated solution for system monitoring (basis for fault tolerance and resiliency)‏

OSCAR 2008 – Quebec City, Canada - 5 System Management Challenges  What are our current challenges?  Remote management  User interfaces  Unix-like tools  Update management  System partitioning  System monitoring  Simplicity (KISS – Keep It Stupid Simple)‏  Goal of this study  extend the current OSCAR architecture in order to address these challenges  be able to use OSCAR for our research

OSCAR 2008 – Quebec City, Canada - 6 Proposed New OSCAR Architecture

OSCAR 2008 – Quebec City, Canada - 7 New OSCAR Core Algorithm  The user setup a new partition  Then, OSCAR performs automatically the following tasks  creates a basic golden image for the partition if no image is available  installs OPKG(s) into the basic golden image  execute post-installation scripts for the installed OPKG(s)‏  assign compute nodes to the image  wait for the compute nodes to contact the server for deployment  when all compute nodes are deployed, execute the configuration scripts  Compared to the current algorithm, mush more details are hidden to the users

OSCAR 2008 – Quebec City, Canada - 8 OPM/Nest  Not a new idea  Implement the smart element of OSCAR  takes the partition configurations  figure out what to do  perform the different tasks, hiding details to users as much as possible  Key idea is the separation of the system configuration and the actual deployment/management tasks  the system configuration is “static” (does not change all the time)‏  configuration saved in ODA  the configuration saved in ODA is used as reference

OSCAR 2008 – Quebec City, Canada - 9 ODA Extension  Central role  store partitions configuration  used by “smart” tools to perform administration tasks  However, ODA was only based on a real database  Difficult to extend  Make new develops more difficult (database modifications take a lot of time)‏  Flat file ODA mode  Still possible to use a real database  Also possible to use flat files (in /etc/oscar/)‏  Simple to extend and modify  Perfect for development

OSCAR 2008 – Quebec City, Canada - 10 ODA Flat Files – Examples ‘-- clusters ‘-- oscar ‘-- partition1 |-- node1 | ‘-- node1.conf |-- node2 | |-- node2.conf | ‘-- vm.conf ‘-- partition1.conf

OSCAR 2008 – Quebec City, Canada - 11 New User Interfaces  Because we try to hide as many details as possible from users, the current CLI was difficult to adapt  New UI requirements  Provide both a CLI & a GUI, based on the same code  CLI requirements  UNIX-like (or POSIX-like)‏  Minimize the number of commands  GUI requirements  possibility to “connect” to remote clusters for a remote management  GUI is running locally  OSCAR commands are executed remotely  use new GUI technologies

OSCAR 2008 – Quebec City, Canada - 12 Overview of the New Command Line Interface  Separate OSCAR commands into two parts  configuration  actually management actions  Two new scripts: oscar-config & oscar  similar to normal UNIX scripts  hide details to users

OSCAR 2008 – Quebec City, Canada - 13 Overview of the C++/Qt4 Graphical User Interface

OSCAR 2008 – Quebec City, Canada - 14 Current Status  Configurator has been fixed: possible to parse configuration file from the CLI  XOSCAR (C++/Qt4 GUI) is actively developed (Bob Barbilon, South Dakota University)‏  runs on Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, and MAC OS  not wizard-based  OSCAR-V integration ongoing  PanYoung – GsoC 2008 – is working on the release of V2M  Full integration planed for OSCAR 5.4  System partitioning  partitioning configuration support available in trunk  deployment still under development  still need to revisit OPKGs

OSCAR 2008 – Quebec City, Canada - 15 Conclusion  Still ongoing work  Ultimate goal  Ease the inclusion of research prototypes  system-level virtualization  fault-tolerance & resiliency  New GUI/CLI  fit needs of some system administrators (“UNIX-like” interface)‏  based on new GUI technologies  allow remote cluster management  Target the inclusion in other tools  OSCAR has a very specific goal  we should ease the integration of OSCAR into other tools that need OSCAR features

OSCAR 2008 – Quebec City, Canada - 16 Contacts Geoffroy Vallée Computer Science Research Group Computer Science and Mathematics Division

OSCAR 2008 – Quebec City, Canada - 17 Questions?