Section: Software and Platforms

Tools for cluster management and software development

Participant : Olivier Richard [correspondent] .

The KA-Tools is a software suite developed by MESCAL for exploitation of clusters and grids. It uses a parallelization technique based on spanning trees with a recursive starting of programs on nodes. Industrial collaborations were carried out with Mandrake, BULL, HP and Microsoft.

KA-Deploy is an environment deployment toolkit that provides automated software installation and reconfiguration mechanisms for large clusters and light grids. The main contribution of KA-Deploy 2 toolkit is the introduction of a simple idea, aiming to be a new trend in cluster and grid exploitation: letting users concurrently deploy computing environments tailored exactly to their experimental needs on different sets of nodes. To reach this goal KA-Deploy must cooperate with batch schedulers, like OAR , and use a parallel launcher like Taktuk (see below).

Taktuk is a tool to launch or deploy efficiently parallel applications on large clusters, and simple grids. Efficiency is obtained thanks to the overlap of all independent steps of the deployment. We have shown that this problem is equivalent to the well known problem of the single message broadcast. The performance gap between the cost of a network communication and of a remote execution call enables us to use a work stealing algorithm to realize a near-optimal schedule of remote execution calls. Currently, a complete rewriting based on a high level language (precisely Perl script language) is under progress. The aim is to provide a light and robust implementation. This development is lead by the MOAIS project-team.