Installing, Running and Maintaining Large Linux Clusters at CERN

TL;DR

This paper shares CERN's practical experience in managing large Linux clusters, focusing on scalability, automation, security, and user service adaptation for high-performance computing environments.

Contribution

It details tools and processes developed for large-scale Linux cluster management, including installation, configuration, monitoring, and grid integration, with insights from CERN's five-year experience.

Findings

Improved cluster manageability through new tools and processes

Enhanced responsiveness and system utilization for user services

Progress in scaling and gridifying heterogeneous Linux clusters

Abstract

Having built up Linux clusters to more than 1000 nodes over the past five years, we already have practical experience confronting some of the LHC scale computing challenges: scalability, automation, hardware diversity, security, and rolling OS upgrades. This paper describes the tools and processes we have implemented, working in close collaboration with the EDG project [1], especially with the WP4 subtask, to improve the manageability of our clusters, in particular in the areas of system installation, configuration, and monitoring. In addition to the purely technical issues, providing shared interactive and batch services which can adapt to meet the diverse and changing requirements of our users is a significant challenge. We describe the developments and tuning that we have introduced on our LSF based systems to maximise both responsiveness to users and overall system utilisation. Finally, this paper will describe the problems we are facing in enlarging our heterogeneous Linux clusters, the progress we have made in dealing with the current issues and the steps we are taking to gridify the clusters