Cluster Control Management as Cluster Middleware

Abstract

Cluster Network technologies have been evolving for the past decades and still gaining a lot of momentum for several reasons. These reasons include the benefits of deploying commodity, off-the-shelf hardware (high-power PCs at low prices), using inexpensive high-speed networking such as fast Ethernet, as well as the resulting benefits of using Linux. One of the major difficulty encounters by cluster administrator in the exploitation of Cluster Networks is handling common tasks, such as setting up consistent software installation or removing on all the nodes or particular node and listing of files or processes will require a lot of time and effort and may affect productivity of the cluster. Even though there are numerous systems available which is known as Cluster Middleware (CM), most of it is developed specifically for in-house use such as scientific research or commercial purpose. Some of them mainly design for job execution rather than node management. To mitigate this problem in the cluster network environment, Cluster Control Management (CCM) system has been developed as a solution for this problem. CCM presently contains six tools, and is extensible to allow more tools to be added. All this six tools are designed for remote cluster administration which includes Switch Manager, Program Manager, Report Manager, User Manager and Administrator Manager. In this paper, we discuss the architecture and the design for CCM using a prototype called UKM C²M deploys using open-source software (OSS).