Clustering inexpensive computers is an effective way to obtain reliable, scalable computing power for network services and compute-intensive applications. Since clusters have a high initial cost of ownership, including space, power conditioning, and cooling equipment, leasing or sharing access to a common cluster is an attractive solution when demands vary over time. Shared clusters offer economies of scale and more effective use of resources by multiplexing.
Users of a shared cluster should be free to select the software environments that best support their needs. Cluster-on-Demand (COD) is a system to enable rapid, automated, on-the-fly partitioning of a physical cluster into multiple independent virtual clusters. A virtual cluster (vcluster) is a group of machines (physical or virtual) configured for a common purpose, with associated user accounts and storage resources, a user-specified software environment, and a private IP address block and DNS naming domain. COD vclusters are dynamic; their node allotments may change according to demand or resource availability.
COD was inspired by Oceano, an IBM Research project to automate a Web server farm. Like Oceano, COD leverages remote-boot technology to reconfigure cluster nodes using database-driven network installs from a set of user-specified configuration templates, under the direction of a policy-based resource manager. Emulab uses a similar approach to configure groups of nodes for network emulation experiments on a shared testbed. COD is complementary to both of these efforts: it decouples cluster management functions from network emulation, and adds a hierarchical framework for dynamic resource management that generalizes to multiple classes of cluster applications.
source : http://issg.cs.duke.edu/cod/
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