User Interfaces for Clustering Tools

This paper discusses ongoing research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to make computing clusters easier to use. Cluster ad-ministration, setup, and use is an active re-search area with many different components. Two systems for cluster control and adminis-tration, that have been experimented with at ORNL, are Managing Multiple Clusters (M3C) and Cluster Control GUI (C2G). M3C uses a Java Servlet in conjunction with a Java applica-tion server to handle communications between a remote user and the head node. C2G takes an alternate approach and uses the sshd to han-dle these messages. Another important issue to consider is the mechanism that is used to han-dle communications between compute nodes. A new system that is under construction at ORNL is designed to allow a user to easily keep track of software that is loaded on a node. This system has two components, a node man-ager daemon and a package services back-end that is basically a database. Multiple soft-ware configurations for a compute node can be stored and loaded on a node with this system. ∗Research supported by the Mathematics, Informa