CRONO: A Congurable Management System for Linux Clusters

There are several application elds in which parallel processing is an essential tool. Using parallel architectures, it is possible to solve very complex problems that need high computing power. In this context, cluster computing has become an excel-lent alternative to mainframes, usually much more expensive. In order to exploit all available resources and to try to achieve optimum performance, efcient cluster management tools are needed. When looking for such a manager for the clusters of our research lab we were not satised with the services and level of conguration provided by the most popular systems like Computing Center Software, DQS, and Portable Batch System. Although very powerful and congurable, these system are reasonably complex to install and congure. Therefore we decided to implement our own management system, a highly congurable one, but easier to install and to use. CRONO is being used for the last 6 months to manage our three Linux clusters and it is already very stable. Each cluster has its own peculiarities, having a different number of nodes (4, 16, and 32), different interconnection networks (combinations of SCI, Fast-Ethernet and Myrinet) and also different user proles. Although being simple to install and congure, CRONO is a highly congurable system, allowing the system manager to congure the access privileges individually for each machine and group of users.