GEON Information Technology Innovations 12 Grid Systems Deployment & Management Using Rocks

Objective: Design a centralized mechanism to define and roll out the software stack to hard-ware resources at the partner institutions in GEON grid. Description: Computational clusters have become the dominant platform for a wide range of scientific disciplines. Cluster management software is available that allows administrators to specify and install a common software stack on all cluster nodes, and enable centralized control and diagnostics of components with minimal effort. While grid deployments have similar man-agement requirements, they have faced a lack of available tools to address their needs. These grids seek to offer a common operating environment for a community or scientific domain, and typically involve a diverse set of resources operating in a geographically dispersed environ-ment. We discuss grid design from the perspective of GEON, although its similarity to other grid efforts makes our results applicable to other projects. Figure 1: GEONGrid Wide Area Deployment Architecture using Rocks Figure 1 shows the GEON grid architecture. A set of physically distributed clusters are located within the administrative domain of each of many participating sites. These clusters may have zero or more compute nodes and may consist of different hardware architectures. The operatio