I got some feedback from an attendee at SC about OSCAR. He makes the
following suggestions:
1. First is due to the nature of the disk boot model. There's no low
level way to know why a node doesn't boot. If one doesn't come up
then putting a monitor on it is required. I don't know what you would
do about it. It's pretty low level. Finding a third-party solution
and bundling it in would be nice if possible.
2. The problem that can be resolved more easily is the post-install
configuration. Oscar is really good at the initial install but try
doing something like building the latest kernel from source and
distributing it to the nodes. It's not easy. We have a lot of things
that need to be installed from source. What I do is chroot to the
image, make the changes and do a cpushimage. It works but it's not
oscar friendly. It would be nice if I could do something more in the
GUI. I understand that updating the image is going to be text and
manual but I don't believe the gui lets me push the updated image.
Keep in mind that I don't want to reformat the disk every time. I may
just want to push a single updated binary out.
3. Also, ganglia is a nice monitor but it would be nice to be able to
do things like reboot a node from the gui. I know it can be done at
the command line.
Basically, if there's going to be a gui it should do more. If not
that's ok too but then what's the value added from oscar.
These suggestions stem from real-world every day usage of OSCAR, and I
think they are perfectly reasonable. I'm not quite sure how we would
solve #1 (anyone have any suggestions there?), but #2 and #3 seem
do-able (and #3 might actually be solved by the OSCAR portal project
from the Google SOC...? I don't such capabilities necessarily need to
be integrated into Ganglia directly)
Comments?
--
{+} Jeff Squyres
{+} The Open MPI Project
{+} http://www.open-mpi.org/
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