Speaker
R. Panse
(KIRCHHOFF INSTITUTE FOR PHYSICS - UNIVERSITY OF HEIDELBERG)
Description
Super-computers will be replaced more and more by PC cluster
systems. Also future LHC experiments will use large PC clusters.
These clusters will consist of off-the-shelf PCs, which in general
are not built to run in a PC farm. Configuring, monitoring and
controlling such clusters requires a serious amount of time
consuming and administrative effort.
We propose a cheap and easy hardware solution for this issue. The
main item of our cluster control system is the Cluster Interface
Agent card (CIA).
The CIA card is a low-cost PCI expansion card equipped with a
network interface. With the aid of the CIA card the computer can be
fully controlled remotely, independent of the state of the node
itself. The card combines a number of feature needed for this remote
control, including power management and reset. The card operates
entirely independent of the PC and can remain powered while the PC
may even be powered down. It offers a wide range of automatization
features, including automatic installation of the operating
system, changing BIOS settings or booting a rescue disk and also to
monitor and debug the node. With the aid of PCI scans and hardware
tests errors and pending failures can be easily detected in an early
stage.
Working prototypes exist. The presentation will outline the status
of the project and first implementation results of the preproduction
devices, currently being built.
Primary authors
H. TILSNER
(Kirchhoff Institute of Physics, Heidelberg, Germany)
L. Hess
(KIRCHHOFF INSTITUTE FOR PHYSICS - UNIVERSITY OF HEIDELBERG)
R. Panse
(KIRCHHOFF INSTITUTE FOR PHYSICS - UNIVERSITY OF HEIDELBERG)
T. Alt
(KIRCHHOFF INSTITUTE FOR PHYSICS - UNIVERSITY OF HEIDELBERG)
V. Lindenstruth
(KIRCHHOFF INSTITUTE FOR PHYSICS - UNIVERSITY OF HEIDELBERG)
