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openlava – Hot resource manager
Share the Load
One of the most critical pieces of software on a cluster is the resource manager, commonly called a job scheduler. It allows users to share the system in a very efficient and cost-effective way.
The idea is fairly simple: Users write small scripts, commonly called "jobs" that define what they want to run and the resources that are required, and then submit the jobs to the resource manager. When the resources are available, the resource manager executes the job script on behalf of the user. Typically, this approach is for batch jobs – that is, jobs that are not interactive – but it can also be used for interactive jobs in which the resource manager gives you a shell prompt to the node that is running your job.
You have several options when it comes to resource managers. Some of them are commercially supported and others are open source, either with or without a support option. The list of options is fairly long, but the one I want to cover in this article is called openlava [1].
openlava
Platform Computing has had one of the most successful and arguably robust commercially supported resource managers, named LSF, for many years. A while ago, Platform created a cluster management tool that is now called IBM Platform Cluster Manager (PCM) [Note: Platform was acquired by IBM]. PCM is an open source package, and Platform wanted to integrate an open source resource manager with the tool. In 2007 Platform took an older version of LSF, version 4.2, and created an open source resource manager, which they named Platform Lava [2] or just "Lava." It is still included in PCM today.
Not too long ago, some developers based a new resource manager on Lava, calling it openlava. Openlava has been developed to go beyond the incorrectly advertised cluster size of 512
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openlava – Hot Resource Manager
HPC systems are really designed to be shared by several users. One way to share them is through a software tool called a resource manager. Openlava is an open source version of the commercial scheduler LSF. It shares the robustness of LSF while being freely available, very scalable, and easy to install and customize.