HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING


Tech focus: HPC management software


ROBERT ROE TAKES A LOOK AT A SELECTION OF SOFTWARE TOOLS DESIGNED TO MAKE IT EASIER TO MANAGE AND IMPLEMENT HPC RESOURCES


As HPC systems continue to grow in complexity, the sheer


number of hardware components and through the increasing parallelism of those components, the effective management of these systems becomes increasingly critical to maximise the return on investment in scientific computing. Ensuring that a cluster is


utilised efficiently is a full-time job. However, employing the latest software can reduce the burden of supporting a HPC cluster, reduce the number of people needed to manage the resource, or allow more science and engineering to be completed by utilising the resource more efficiently. The options available for


cluster management software are as varied as the types of computing systems on which they can be deployed. Whether you are an academic institution leveraging open- source software due to budget restrictions, or a commercial company paying for software with additional support and maintenance, choosing the right software package can save key resources. OCF has developed its


own software stack through the implementation and deployment of HPC systems over many years. ‘When you scale over a number of machines, you need to have a way of managing those machines, installing an


4 Scientific Computing World Autumn 2021


operating system, setting up and managing that environment,’ said Andy Dean, sales director, OCF. ‘That’s essentially what a piece of cluster management software, or a suite of management software gives you; managing and provisioning capabilities to allow you to keep the environment consistent across all those machines. A HPC cluster isn’t an HPC cluster until you install a management stack on top of it – it’s just a bunch of nodes.’ OCF has developed its own


HPC management software stack based on several open- source technologies that the company works with regularly and recommends to its users. This stack consists of several components, including Slurm, X-cat, Proxmox, CrateDB, Prometheus, Saltstack and Grafana. However, Dean notes that the company is flexible and has extensive experience working with different types of HPC software. ‘We have a modular approach that allows us to add any other major component... and the skills to allow us to implement any of those components along with our software stack, if that’s what our customers would prefer,’ said Dean. Laurence Horrocks-Barlow,


technical director at OCF, commented: ‘We’ve developed the stack, we can use any technologies as modules, but our preferred, well tested and integrated workload manager is Slurm. Over the last few years


we’ve been putting an official development product life cycle around the development of our in-house software stack to the point that there’s a dedicated research and development team with dedicated releases quarterly. We put a lot of time and focus on what our customers require. ‘The OCF STEEL stack is


this continual development and integration with what the HPC community wants, and what customers require to provision their HPC services to their customers,’ said Horrocks-Barlow.


Other products


Aspen Systems Cluster Management software comes standard with all of its HPC clusters, along with its standard service package at no additional cost. Aspen Cluster HPC Management software is compatible with most Linux distributions and is supported for the life of the cluster. Bright Cluster Manager


software automates the process of building and managing modern, high-performance Linux clusters, eliminating


”We have a modular approach that allows us to add any other major component”


complexity and enabling flexibility. Bright software aims to eliminate complexity and enables flexibility by allowing users to deploy complete Linux clusters over bare metal and manage them reliably from edge, to core, to cloud. Providing cluster management solutions for the new era of HPC, Bright Computing combines provisioning, monitoring and management capabilities in a single tool that spans the entire lifecycle of your Linux cluster. With Bright Cluster Manager, your administrators can provide better support to end users and your business. Advanced Clustering


Technologies (ACT) has designed ClusterVisor to enable you to easily deploy your HPC cluster and manage everything from the hardware and operating system to software and networking using a single GUI. The full-featured ClusterVisor tool gives you


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