Efficient and Scalable Operating System Provisioning for Clusters

Lucas Nussbaum is an Assistant Professor at Université de Lorraine. His research focuses on high performance computing and distributed systems. He is also involved in a professional curriculum focusing on system administration. [email protected] Installing an operating system can be tedious when it must be reproduced on many computers, on large scale clusters, for instance . Because installing the nodes independently is not realistic, disk cloning or imaging with tools such as Clonezilla [1], Rocks [5], SystemImager [6], or xCAT [8] is a common approach . In those cases, the administrator must keep updated just one node (sometimes called the golden node) that will be replicated to other nodes . In this article, we present Kadeploy3, a tool designed to perform operating system provisioning using disk imaging and cloning . Thanks to its efficiency, scalability, and reliability, this tool is particularly suited for large scale clusters .