1. Rocks Clusters SUN HPC Consortium November 2004 Federico D. Sacerdoti Advanced CyberInfrastructure Group San Diego Supercomputer Center

2. Copyright © 2004 F. Sacerdoti, M. Katz, G. Bruno, P. Papadopoulos, UC Regents Outline Rocks Identity Rocks Mission Why Rocks Rocks Design Rocks Technologies, Services, Capabilities Rockstar

3. Copyright © 2004 F. Sacerdoti, M. Katz, G. Bruno, P. Papadopoulos, UC Regents Rocks Identity System to build and manage Linux Clusters  General Linux maintenance system for N nodes  Desktops too  Happens to be good for clusters Free Mature High Performance  Designed for scientific workloads

4. Copyright © 2004 F. Sacerdoti, M. Katz, G. Bruno, P. Papadopoulos, UC Regents Rocks Mission Make Clusters Easy (Papadopoulos, 00) Most cluster projects assume a sysadmin will help build the cluster. Build a cluster without assuming CS knowledge  Simple idea, complex ramifications  Automatic configuration of all components and services  ~30 services on frontend, ~10 services on compute nodes  Clusters for Scientists Results in a very robust system that is insulated from human mistakes

5. Copyright © 2004 F. Sacerdoti, M. Katz, G. Bruno, P. Papadopoulos, UC Regents Why Rocks Easiest way to build a Rockstar-class machine with SGE ready out of the box More supported architectures  Pentium, Athlon, Opteron, Nocona, Itanium More happy users  280 registered clusters, 700 member support list  HPCwire Readers Choice Awards 2004 More configured HPC software: 15 optional extensions (rolls) and counting. Unmatched Release Quality.

6. Copyright © 2004 F. Sacerdoti, M. Katz, G. Bruno, P. Papadopoulos, UC Regents Why Rocks Big projects use Rocks  BIRN (20 clusters)  GEON (20 clusters)  NBCR (6 clusters) Supports different clustering toolkits  Rocks Standard (RedHat HPC)  SCE  SCore (Single Process Space)  OpenMosix (Single Process Space: on the way)

7. Copyright © 2004 F. Sacerdoti, M. Katz, G. Bruno, P. Papadopoulos, UC Regents Rocks Design Uses RedHat’s intelligent installer  Leverages RedHat’s ability to discover & configure hardware  Everyone tries System Imaging at first  Who has homogeneous hardware?  If so, whose cluster stays that way? Description Based install: Kickstart  Like Jumpstart Contains a viable Operating System  No need to “pre-configure” an OS

8. Copyright © 2004 F. Sacerdoti, M. Katz, G. Bruno, P. Papadopoulos, UC Regents Rocks Design No special “Rocksified” package structure. Can install any RPM. Where Linux core packages come from:  RedHat Advanced Workstation (from SRPMS)  Enterprise Linux 3

9. Copyright © 2004 F. Sacerdoti, M. Katz, G. Bruno, P. Papadopoulos, UC Regents Rocks Leap of Faith Install is primitive operation for Upgrade and Patch  Seems wrong at first  Why must you reinstall the whole thing?  Actually right: debugging a Linux system is fruitless at this scale. Reinstall enforces stability.  Primary user has no sysadmin to help troubleshoot Rocks install is scalable and fast: 15min for entire cluster  Post script work done in parallel by compute nodes. Power Admins may use up2date or yum for patches.  To compute nodes by reinstall

10. Rocks Technology

11. Copyright © 2004 F. Sacerdoti, M. Katz, G. Bruno, P. Papadopoulos, UC Regents Cluster Integration with Rocks 1. Build a frontend node 1. Insert CDs: Base, HPC, Kernel, optional Rolls 2. Answer install screens: network, timezone, password 2. Build compute nodes 1. Run insert-ethers on frontend (dhcpd listener) 2. PXE boot compute nodes in name order 3. Start Computing

12. Copyright © 2004 F. Sacerdoti, M. Katz, G. Bruno, P. Papadopoulos, UC Regents Rocks Tech: Dynamic Kickstart File On node install

13. Copyright © 2004 F. Sacerdoti, M. Katz, G. Bruno, P. Papadopoulos, UC Regents Rocks Roll Architecture Rolls are Rocks Modules  Think Apache Software for cluster  Packaged  3rd party tarballs  Tested  Automatically configured services RPMS plus Kickstart graph in ISO form.

14. Copyright © 2004 F. Sacerdoti, M. Katz, G. Bruno, P. Papadopoulos, UC Regents Rocks Tech: Dynamic Kickstart File With Roll (HPC) HPCbase

15. Copyright © 2004 F. Sacerdoti, M. Katz, G. Bruno, P. Papadopoulos, UC Regents Rocks Tech: Wide Area Net Install Install a frontend without CDs Benefits Can install from minimal boot image Rolls downloaded dynamically Community can build specific extensions

16. Copyright © 2004 F. Sacerdoti, M. Katz, G. Bruno, P. Papadopoulos, UC Regents Rocks Tech: Security & Encryption To protect the kickstart file

17. Copyright © 2004 F. Sacerdoti, M. Katz, G. Bruno, P. Papadopoulos, UC Regents Rocks Tech: 411 Information Service 411 does NIS  Distribute passwords File based, simple  HTTP transport  Multicast Scalable Secure

18. Rocks Services

19. Copyright © 2004 F. Sacerdoti, M. Katz, G. Bruno, P. Papadopoulos, UC Regents Rocks Cluster Homepage

20. Copyright © 2004 F. Sacerdoti, M. Katz, G. Bruno, P. Papadopoulos, UC Regents Rocks Services: Ganglia Monitoring

21. Copyright © 2004 F. Sacerdoti, M. Katz, G. Bruno, P. Papadopoulos, UC Regents Rocks Services: Job Monitoring SGE Batch System

22. Copyright © 2004 F. Sacerdoti, M. Katz, G. Bruno, P. Papadopoulos, UC Regents Rocks Services: Job Monitoring How a job affects resources on this node

23. Copyright © 2004 F. Sacerdoti, M. Katz, G. Bruno, P. Papadopoulos, UC Regents Rocks Services: Configured, Ready Grid (Globus, from NMI) Condor (NMI)  Globus GRAM SGE  Globus GRAM MPD parallel job launcher (Argonne)  MPICH 1, 2 Intel Compiler set PVFS

24. Rocks Capabilities

25. Copyright © 2004 F. Sacerdoti, M. Katz, G. Bruno, P. Papadopoulos, UC Regents High Performance Interconnect Support Myrinet  All major versions, GM2  Automatic configuration and support in Rocks since first release Infiniband  Via Collaboration with AMD & Infinicon  IB  IPoIB

26. Copyright © 2004 F. Sacerdoti, M. Katz, G. Bruno, P. Papadopoulos, UC Regents Rocks Visualization “Viz” Wall Enables LCD Clusters  One PC / tile  Gigabit Ethernet  Tile Frame Applications  Large remote sensing  Volume Rendering  Seismic Interpretation Electronic Visualization Lab  Bio-Informatics  Bio-Imaging (NCMIR BioWall)

27. Rockstar

28. Copyright © 2004 F. Sacerdoti, M. Katz, G. Bruno, P. Papadopoulos, UC Regents Rockstar Cluster Collaboration between SDSC and SUN 129 Nodes: Sun V60x (Dual P4 Xeon)  Gigabit Ethernet Networking (copper)  Top500 list positions: 201, 433 Built on showroom floor of Supercomputing Conference 2003  Racked, Wired, Installed: 2 hrs total  Running apps through SGE

29. Copyright © 2004 F. Sacerdoti, M. Katz, G. Bruno, P. Papadopoulos, UC Regents Building of Rockstar

30. Copyright © 2004 F. Sacerdoti, M. Katz, G. Bruno, P. Papadopoulos, UC Regents Rockstar Topology 24-port switches Not a symmetric network  Best case - 4:1 bisection bandwidth  Worst case - 8:1  Average - 5.3:1 Linpack achieved 49% of peak Very close to percentage peak of 1st generation DataStar at SDSC

31. Copyright © 2004 F. Sacerdoti, M. Katz, G. Bruno, P. Papadopoulos, UC Regents Rocks Future Work High Availability: N Frontend nodes.  Not that far off (supplemental install server design)  Limited by Batch System  Frontends are long lived in practice:  Keck 2 Cluster (UCSD) uptime: 249 days, 2:56 Extreme install scaling More Rolls! Refinements

32. Copyright © 2004 F. Sacerdoti, M. Katz, G. Bruno, P. Papadopoulos, UC Regents www.rocksclusters.org Rocks mailing List  https://lists.sdsc.edu/mailman/listinfo.cgi/npaci-rocks-discussion Rocks Cluster Register  http://www.rocksclusters.org/rocks-register Core: {fds,bruno,mjk,phil}@sdsc.edu