OSCAR allows users, regardless of their experience level with a *nix environment, to install a Beowulf type high performance computing cluster. It also contains everything needed to administer and program this type of HPC cluster. OSCAR's flexible package management system has a rich set of pre-packaged applications and utilities which means you can get up and running without laboriously installing and configuring complex cluster administration and communication packages. It also lets administrators create customized packages for any kind of distributed application or utility, and to distribute those packages from an online package repository, either on or off site.
OSCAR installs on top of a standard installation of a supported Linux distribution. It installs and configures all required software for the selected packages according to user input. Then it creates customized disk images which are used to provision the computational nodes in the cluster with all the client software and administrative tools needed for immediate use. OSCAR also includes a robust and extensible testing architecture, ensuring that the cluster setup you have chosen is ready for production.
The default OSCAR setup is generally used for scientific computing using a message passing interface (MPI) implementation, several of which are included in the default OSCAR package set. One of OSCAR's strengths is that it is possible to install multiple MPI implementations on one cluster and switch easily between them, either at the system default level or the individual user level.
Other types of applications which use clusters of computers, such as load balancing web clusters and high availability clustering packages, would certainly be fairly easy to implement using the OSCAR package system but are outside the expertise of our current development team.
Anyone is welcome to contribute to OSCAR core development, or to submit packages to be included in the default OSCAR repositories. We are a community driven project and are always on the lookout for new talent and ideas.
OSCAR on!
The OSCAR Development Team
OSCAR-6.0 is out!
This version provides the latest modifications which will ease future developments. On the roadmap, we already plan to include many project on which students worked during the summer 2008, including a benchmarking framework, a monitoring framework, and mechanisms to deal with specific NFS configuration. This version will also be a good base for bug fixes.
Remember that this version does not provide yet all the capabilities OSCAR were used to provide. For this version, we ...
Since the latest update of the INRIA forge, where the OSCARonDebian website was hosted, it is not possible to maintain the website in good conditions. Therefore we migrated the OSCARonDebian website on the OSCAR wiki: OSCARonDebian.
We did not migrate all the pages yet but the most important pages have been migrated.
OSCAR 5.2 becomes OSCAR 6.0 and a beta version is now available!
Fist of all, let's explain why we decided to call the next release 6.0 instead of 5.2. It is actually very simple: the way OSCAR is initialized changed and the different commands users are supposed to use also changed. Therefore, there is no good compatibility between OSCAR-5.1 and the new release. Because of this lack of compabilities, we decided to version this release 6.0 instead of 5.2.
Now, what about the beta ver ...
Updated on: 2008-12-22 18:11
We have a good news this month: an new alpha version of OSCAR-5.2, the second one, is available (note that this is still a snapshot of trunk). This version supports both Debian based systems (i.e., Debian 4.0, ubuntu-7.10, and ubuntu 8.04) and RPM based system (i.e., CentOS-5 i386, CentOS-5 x86_64, RHEL-5 i386, and RHEL-5 x86_64)!
From now, we just need to test this version to be able to release OSCAR-5.2. Also note that this version only includes OSCAR core, OSCAR packages will be incl ...
We organize this year again a Birds-of-Feather (BoF) at SuperComputing 2008. Please join us if you plan to attend SuperComputing. We will do some announcements during the BoF. :-)
More details here: http://scyourway.nacse.org/conference/view/bof125
We have a good news this month: an alpha version of OSCAR-5.2 (in fact the SVN trunk) is available for Debian based systems (i.e., Debian 4.0, ubuntu-7.10, and ubuntu 8.04)!
The major modifications for OSCAR-5.2 are:
Updated on: 2008-11-30 00:42
This month i would like to point at the latest developments on the OSCAR core:
We had many summer projects this year:
System-level virtualization is today widely used for server consolidation and even if the benefits of system-level virtualization for High Performance Computing is still very unclear, one may argue that a management software such as OSCAR should support virtualization. What is the current support for virtualization in OSCAR? Is it possible to deploy VMWare or Xen virtual machines with OSCAR and to monitor them remotely? A team at ORNL was actually working on that issue and the OSCAR-V project ...
First of all, let me introduce myself. I am Geoffroy Vallee, scientist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and chairman of the OSCAR project since few weeks. As chairman, i will try to publish a "bulletin", each month, highlyting few interesting points. It can be ongoing developments, current unknown features or even related projects.
This month, i will present a specific point i would like to focus on for the next OSCAR releases: the isolation of a small and simple core, and the separation ...
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