OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Dec. 6, 2002 -- The OSCAR working group is pleased to announce the release of version 2.0 of the Open Source Cluster Application Resources (OSCAR) toolkit. This announcement follows the successful demonstration of version 2.0 at the IEEE SuperComputing 2002 (SC2002) conference in Baltimore, MD.
The OSCAR toolkit is used to build, configure and manage clusters. Its primary objective is to make use of "best practices" for Cluster High Performance Computing (HPC). OSCAR enables a user to setup and maintain a cluster with the same software typically found on HPC Clusters, while greatly reducing the complexity.
This marks the third consecutive year that OSCAR has been featured at SuperComputing. In the year leading to SC2002, the toolkit has had several significant additions including: packaging API with test harness, remote package retrieval, node management, environment management, and extended distribution support including IA-64.
The OSCAR Package API enables authors to add their own software to the installation process. In addition, a set of scripts may be invoked to provide package configuration outside of the RPM.
A remote package download tool, OSCAR Package Downloader (OPD), as well a package selection facility have been added. Together these facilities enable 3rd party packages to be added without being directly included in the OSCAR distribution. Once an OSCAR package is obtained from the remote location the package selection can be tailored to a user's needs from within the OSCAR Wizard GUI.
Node management has been enhanced to support the addition and deletion of cluster nodes after the initial installation. This is performed through the OSCAR Wizard GUI.
The Switcher tool provides a clean interface to manage environment at both system and user levels throughout the cluster. This tool extends the existing facility of Modules to enable persistent changes through a simple command line interface. This allows system wide defaults, e.g. default MPI to use, to be manipulated by users at their discretion. Additionally, Switcher ensures environment consistency on both interactive and non-interactive shells (i.e. rsh/ssh).
The 2.0 release offers support for RedHat 7.2 & 7.3, IA-32 and IA-64 and Mandrake 8.2.
The OSCAR working group is a consortium of industry, academic and research participants. Primary contributors are Bald Guy Software, Dell, IBM, Intel, Indiana University (IU), Intel, MSC.Software, National Computational Science Alliance (NCSA), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Sherbrooke University. OSCAR is the product of the initial working group of the Open Cluster Group (OCG). OCG is dedicated to making cluster computing practical. These groups are open to anyone interested in participating.
At over 80,000 downloads to date (Dec 2002), OSCAR is the most popular open source cluster HPC solution.
Related resources:
ORNL is a Department of Energy multiprogram research facility managed by UT-Battelle.