Proposal for Modifications to the OSCAR Architecture to Address Challenges in Distributed System Management
By:
Vallee, Geoffroy R; Naughton III, Thomas J; Scott, Stephen L
Page Number:
1
Book Title:
Proceedings of the International Symposium on High Performance Computing Systems and Applications 2008
Publication Date:
January 3, 2009
Publisher Location:
IEEE, Los Alamitos, California, United States of America
Conference Name:
The 6th Annual Symposium on OSCAR and HPC Cluster Systems
Conference Location:
Quebec City, Canada
Abstract
OSCAR, a tool for the deployment and the management of clusters, has
historically provided a simple Graphical User Interface (GUI) that aims to
hide technical details associated with the management of such distributed
platforms.
The OSCAR GUI followed a fairly monolithic architecture, which was difficult to
extend. Thankfully, OSCAR developers have made deep modifications to the
overall OSCAR architecture to be much more modular, and as a result it is fairly
simple to support OSCAR on new Linux distributions.
However, a few questions remain. Is the present OSCAR architecture suitable
to address current challenges needed for the management of distributed
systems? For instance, is OSCAR providing a tool set that answers the needs
of system administrators?
This document presents a criticism of the present OSCAR architecture in
order to identify current challenges related to distributed system
management. Based on this analysis, we propose a modified version of the
OSCAR architecture that emphasizes simplicity and incremental enhancements.
