About DCC project

From the homepage: "System Installation Suite is a collection of open source software projects designed to work together to automate the installation and configuration of networked workstations."

The DCC project strongly depends on SIS suite as the core autoinstallation and image deployment model.

From the homepage: "TORQUE (Tera-scale Open-source Resource and QUEue manager) is a resource manager providing control over batch jobs and distributed compute nodes. It is a community effort based on the original PBS project and has incorporated significant advances in the areas of scalability, fault tolerance, and feature extensions contributed by NCSA, OSC, USC, the U.S. Dept of Energy, Sandia, PNNL, U of Buffalo, TeraGrid, and many other leading edge HPC organizations."

DCC suite comes with TORQUE system, prepackaged for Debian. Hence the following legal notice: "This product includes software developed by NASA Ames Research Center, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Veridian Information Solutions, Inc. To obtain complete source code for OpenPBS and modifications/additions provided in torque visit www.openpbs.org and/or www.supercluster.org/downloads."

From the homepage: "This suite implements a number of command line based tools that have been shown to increase system manager scalability by reducing time and effort to operate and manage the cluster."

The C3 suite is a integral part of DCC.

From the homepage: "LDAP stands for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. As the name suggests, it is a lightweight protocol for accessing directory services, specifically X.500-based directory services. LDAP runs over TCP/IP or other connection oriented transfer services. The nitty-gritty details of LDAP are defined in RFC2251 "The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (v3)" and other documents comprising the technical specification RFC3377. This section gives an overview of LDAP from a user's perspective."

DCC clusters use LDAP as the core authentication infrastructure within the cluster. The LDAP server is located on the front-node, and it holds all the account information (/etc/passwd etc.). It makes central account management possible.

From the homepage: "Ganglia is a scalable distributed monitoring system for high-performance computing systems such as clusters and Grids. It is based on a hierarchical design targeted at federations of clusters. It leverages widely used technologies such as XML for data representation, XDR for compact, portable data transport, and RRDtool for data storage and visualization. It uses carefully engineered data structures and algorithms to achieve very low per-node overheads and high concurrency. The implementation is robust, has been ported to an extensive set of operating systems and processor architectures, and is currently in use on over 500 clusters around the world. It has been used to link clusters across university campuses and around the world and can scale to handle clusters with 2000 nodes."

For system-health monitoring, Ganglia was chosen for it's scalability and robustness. Although the main system monitoring software was already available within the Debian tree, the webfrontend needed to be packaged into Debian package form.

From the homepage: "ISC's Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol Distribution provides a freely redistributable reference implementation of all aspects of the DHCP protocol, through a suite of DHCP tools: DHCP server, DHCP client, DHCP relay agent"

DHCP v3 is a integral part of the DCC suite. The DHCP server is responsible for IP address assignment within the cluster.

From the homepage: "The Shoreline Firewall, more commonly known as "Shorewall", is a high-level tool for configuring Netfilter. You describe your firewall/gateway requirements using entries in a set of configuration files. Shorewall reads those configuration files and with the help of the iptables utility, Shorewall configures Netfilter to match your requirements. Shorewall can be used on a dedicated firewall system, a multi-function gateway/router/server or on a standalone GNU/Linux system."

For it's simplicity and flexibility in configuration, Shorewall firewall was chosen to be a integral part of DCC.

The atftpd server is used to provide network-boot functionality for the cluster-nodes.