The Qlustar Cluster OS is the foundation of all other Qlustar components. It provides a single point of control to setup and manage an arbitrary number of servers and provides the foundation of the specific cluster workload you require.
Qlustar is designed to handle small, medium and even the largest clusters with minimum effort but maximum control and efficiency. It shows, that more than 1 1/2 decades of experience in the creation, management and operation of powerful Linux clusters has contributed to its underlying technology.
Lightweight Node OS
Qlustar’s core is an image-based, lightweight and modular node OS. The image modules it is composed of, are installable on the head-node(s) as standard OS packages, pre-generated using our 3rd-generation image module generator and distributed from the Qlustar package repository. This generator is designed such that the OS images created from the available modules contain the exact minimum of programs/files needed for the desired functionality of a compute, storage or cloud node.
Qlustar Image Modules
Qlustar OS images are modular, composed of a core module needed by any cluster node and optional modules selectable to provide additional functionality (e.g. to integrate into a particular batch queuing system or to activate support for Infiniband, parallel filesystems, High-Availability or GPU computing, etc.). New image modules are added, when necessary to widen Qlustar’s use-case spectrum into new clustering fields and technologies.
QluMan: Qlustar Management
- Setting up clusters as easy and consistent as possible.
- Managing and operating them with ease, speed and control.
- Keeping track of hard- and software failures.
Three important issues Qlustar’s management and monitoring framework QluMan is taking care of. QluMan is the brain of any Qlustar cluster. It transforms the underlying complexity of a cluster installation into the simplicity of interacting with an intuitive GUI. With QluMan you’re taking control in the exiting game of cluster management.
More Qlustar Cluster OS Highlights
No more node provisioning
When using Qlustar, node provisioning belongs to the past. Just assign an OS image to a node, (re)boot and it’s ready for use. Initial installation of a cluster, setting up a subset of nodes for tests with a new OS version, moving from CentOS to Ubuntu or vice-versa, all of this is possible with little effort.
Flexible and configurable
No two clusters are alike. Qlustar allows you to customize most aspects of your installation.. It helps you to achieve your design goals efficiently and reliably resulting in the stable and performant system you aimed for. If you feel a configuration option is missing, let us know, and we’ll try hard to implement it in a future release. We listen to our users.
Fast and painless Updates
Security updates or other smaller fixes in an OS Image can easily be applied on-the-fly to a running cluster node. No reboots are required unless the kernel is involved. With this mechanism, important updates are available to the whole cluster in minutes without affecting users or running jobs. Check out the chapter about updates in the Qlustar Administration Manual for details.