HA-OSCAR: the Birth of Highly Available OSCAR

摘要

The seeds for the Open Cluster Group (OCG) and the resulting Open Source Cluster Application Resources (OSCAR) Project were planted when a number of like-minded individuals had the good fortune to sit together for dinner at a meeting sponsored by the Department of Energy on February 17, 2000. Over dinner, this group discussed the effort involved in deploying the software necessary to build a Beowulf high-performance computing cluster. Although this group agreed that it was simple to wire together commodity computers to build the cluster, they went on to agree that the amount of effort required to install and configure the requisite software stack on a Beowulf cluster was inordinately high. Challenging to some and tedious to all was the consensus description. Thus, the idea to simplify the process was bom. Further fertilization of this idea took place in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in April that year at a meeting that included industry, academia and research labs. It was at this first formal meeting that the OCG was formed and work was begun on OSCAR, specifically the Beowulf cluster software stack and associated installation process.