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
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Debian/Ubuntu package.
KestrelHPC is installed as a Debian package on your current system. -
Live nodes.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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>
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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
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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.
2010-02-15 : KestrelHPC 2.0 released
After months of work we finally publish a new stable version.
Best wishes,
KestrelHPC dev. Team
2010-11-26 : Packages uploaded to LaunchPad server
Finally, the second version of KestrelHPC is released. We have upload 2 packages to our LaunchPad server. The installation process and all the related information can be found in the documentation section
Last but no least, this version is still in development, it is functional, but is a BETA version, so during this weeks, many changes will be made until a stable version is published.
Best wishes,
KestrelHPC dev. Team
2010-11-08 : New Mailing lists
We have created two new mailing lists :
2010-11-08 : New Website
As part of the changes comming to the KestrelHPC project, we have created a new website.
KestrelHPC dev. team
2010-10-27 : Version 2 of KestrelHPC
The first approach of the new version of KestrelHPC is been submitted to the SVN server. This first version is not yet fully functional but is close to be stable and usable, so stay alert to check the development of KestrelHPC.
With the version 2 of KestrelHPC we will publish a deb package in a launchpad created for KestrelHPC.
2010-09-06 : The new era of KestrelHPC
A new Era for KestrelHPC is coming close. In the past months we, the development team, have been discussing about KestrelHPC's flaws and have decided to renew and reimplement KestrelHPC.
In this new reimplementation, KestrelHPC will no longer be an installation script, but a debian package which will be installed as a normal Debian package. This change will carry a creation of a LaunchPad server, so that it will be accesible to Ubuntu users.
Apart from other technical changes, that will be documented in due time, some of the PelicanHPC new features are being added, as well as support for other parallel languages.
All this changes are being done in order to have a stable system and also more open and modifiable than the previous one, having in mind different applications to monitor and handle the clusters resources in a 1-click fashion.
This is all, at the end of this month or the beginning of October this major release will be done.
22 April of 2010: A new version of KestrelHPC is launched.
This version fixes some errors in the installation script and changes the way of the image of the nodes are made.
