Speaker
S. Canon
(NATIONAL ENERGY RESEARCH SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING CENTER)
Description
Supporting multiple large collaborations on shared compute
farms has typically resulted in divergent requirements from the
users on the configuration of these farms. As the frameworks used
by these collaborations are adapted to use Grids, this issue will likely
have a significant impact on the effectiveness of Grids.
To address these issues, a method was developed at Lawrence Berkeley National
Lab and is being used in production on the PDSF cluster. This method, termed
CHOS, uses a combination of a Linux kernel module, the change
root system call, and several utilities to provide access to
multiple Linux distributions and versions concurrently on a
single system. This method will be presented, along with an explanation
on how it is integrated into the login process, grid services,
and batch scheduler systems. We will also describe how a distribution
is installed and configured to run in this environment and explore
some common problems that arise. Finally, we will relate our experience
in deploying this framework on a production cluster used by several
high energy and nuclear physics collaborations.
Primary authors
C.L. Whitney
(NATIONAL ENERGY RESEARCH SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING CENTER)
S. Canon
(NATIONAL ENERGY RESEARCH SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING CENTER)
