Software Components

This utility is used to generate boot images for the compute nodes in the cluster. Earlier versions of Scyld used two types of images, initial (Phase 1) and final (Phase 2). The initial images were placed on the hard disk or a floppy disk, and were used to boot the nodes. The final image was downloaded from the master node by the initial image. Currently, only the final image is used by Scyld ClusterWare; support for initial images has been dropped.

By default, the final image is stored on the master node in the /var/beowulf/boot.img file; this is where the Beoserv daemon expects to find it. Where initial images were used to begin the network boot process for systems that lacked PXE support, Scyld now provides PXELinux for this purpose. Bootable PXELinux media may be created for floppy and CD-ROM booting.

This is the BeoBoot daemon. It responds to DHCP requests from the compute nodes in the cluster and serves them their final boot images over the private cluster network.

This is the BProc master daemon. It runs on the master node, listening on a TCP port and accepting connections from BPslave daemons. Configuration information comes from the /etc/beowulf/config file.

This is the BProc compute daemon. It runs on a compute node to accept jobs from the master, and connects to the master through a TCP port.

This is a replacement for rsh (remote shell). It runs a specified command on an individually referenced node. The "nodenum" parameter may be a single node number, a comma delimited list of nodes, "-a" for all nodes that are up, or "-A" for all nodes that are not down.

bpsh will forward standard input, standard output, and standard error for the remote processes it spawns. Standard output and error are forwarded subject to specified options; standard input will be forwarded to the remote processes. If there is more than one remote process, standard input will be duplicated for every remote node. For a single remote process, the exit status of bpsh will be the exit status of the remote process.

This is the BProc control utility. It can be used to apply various commands to individually referenced nodes. bpctl can be used to change the user and group ownership settings for a node; it can also be used to set a node's state. Finally, this utility can be used to query such information as the node's IP address.

This utility can be used to copy files between machines in the cluster. Each file (f1...fn) or directory argument (dir) is either a remote file name of the form node:path, or a local file name (containing no colon ":" characters).

This command displays various pieces of status information about the compute nodes. The display is formatted in columns specifying node number, node status, node permission, user access, and group access. This program also includes a number of options intended to be useful for scripts.

The BeoSetup GUI tool is used primarily by cluster administrators to configure and administer the cluster. However, it can also be used by general users in a read-only mode to monitor cluster status. See the Chapter called Configuring the Cluster with BeoSetup of this document for a detailed discussion of this tool.

The BeoStatus GUI tool is used to monitor cluster status and performance. See the Section called BeoStatus in the Chapter called Monitoring the Status of the Cluster for a discussion of this tool.

The BeoStat command line tool is a text-based utility used to monitor cluster status and performance. This tool provides a text listing of the information from the /proc structure on each node. See the Section called beostat and libbeostat in the Chapter called Monitoring the Status of the Cluster for a discussion of this tool.

The Scyld Integrated Management Framework (IMF) is used by a cluster administrator to monitor and administer the cluster from a Web browser. It requires Apache to run (service httpd) and is access-protected with a web-application specific username, admin, and password combination. The password must be initialized prior to first use of Scyld IMF, e.g. by doing:

 [root@cluster ~] # htpasswd /etc/httpd/imf/htpasswd-users admin