C3 Power Tools

Through the administration and use of eXtremeTORC, HighTORC, TORC and the various other HPC clusters at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), it quickly became apparent that a solution for the administration of federated clusters, or “clusters of clusters,” was needed. While a few cluster tools did exist when this work was started, there were none with the vision to handle multiple clusters as a single cohesive computing environment. These other tools also required that the administrator or user be directly logged into a user account on one of the clustered machines. This resulted in at least one duplicate operation for each cluster being addressed. It is obvious that this process does not scale. Thus a solution was needed whereby an administrator or general HPC user could perform duplicate operations across multiple clusters, and portions thereof, in a scalable and secure fashion from a single location not necessarily one where the user is logged in. Thus was the drive for the development of version 3.0 of the Cluster Command and Control (C3) power tools.