KestrelHPC

What is KestrelHPC?

KestrelHPC is a set of tools which help setting up a diskless Beowulf cluster.

This project was born in answer to the need for having a cluster without having to pay a considerable amount of money. The first version of KestrelHPC was strongly based on PelicanHPC and the owner of the project, Michael Creel, was a really important asset to the project. In the second version, KestrelHPC's code was rewritten from scratch and now, KestrelHPC has become an installable deb package.

Features

• Debian/Ubuntu package.

  KestrelHPC is installed as a Debian package on your current system.

• Live nodes.

• Configures and installs all the required services.

  • dnsmasq: dhcp and tftpboot
  • pxelinux: Manages the LAN boot of the slave nodes
  • nfs4: Manages the export and fstab entries.
  • ssh: Creates keys for each user to access the nodes.

• Minimal systems are run on the nodes.

  • Minimal Debian based systems are run on the nodes to reduce the memory usage and the traffic on the local net.
  • Required software is installed automatically on each image.

• Manage simply the nodes of the cluster.

  Run

   kestrel-control --register "Genetics-image-1"

  And start up each node you want to add to the cluster using PXE. KestrelHPC will save its mac and associate it to an image.

• It helps starting up nodes using WOL.

  You can start a node by its mac or hostname :

  kestrel-control --wake <hostname>|<mac>

  You can also start a group of nodes associated to an image :

  kestrel-control --wake <image name>

• It helps creating and managing multiple images

  You can create new images easily with kestrel-images.

  kestrel-image --new "Genetics-image-1"

  You can install or uninstall packages in each image with kestrel-apt.

  kestrel-apt --image "image1" --install vim --uninstall nano

• Easily extendable and customizable.

  • Modules extends the cluster capabilities. Now we have 2 modules : Ganglia and OpenMPI, but new modules can be written easily.
  • Any functionality or script can be easily customized.
  • Each service is configured by its own set of scripts.

Recent News

Important news about KestrelHPC's releases and other related material.