| CLUSTERS OR GRIDS? WHO CARES? WHAT WE REALLY NEED IS STANDARDIZED MANAGEMENT |
As the industry makes a widespread transition to cluster computing,
there is much discussion in the HPC world about how we define these
environments. At the end of the day, organizations just don’t care and
neither should we. There are a number of real-world challenges we face
today in the HPC space as we drive broader adoption of Grid and
cluster-compute environments. In my view, one such challenge is more
prevalent then all of the rest: the need for standardized cluster
management. In the HPC industry, we have commonality at the hardware,
OS and applications layer, but the management layer remains an anomaly.
Organizations today suffer from a hodge-podge of incompatible software
for cluster installation, configuration, monitoring and other key
management tasks. The lack of a cohesive layer between infrastructure
resources and applications has the potential to constrain growth and
adoption for the industry going forward. |
