Kerrighed: A single system image cluster operating system for high performance computing

Abstract

Kerrighed is a single system image operating system for clusters. Kerrighed aims at combining high performance, high availability and ease of use and programming. Kerrighed implements a set of global resource management services that aim at making resource distribution transparent to the applications, at managing resource sharing in and between applications and at taking benefit of the whole cluster resources for demanding applications. Kerrighed is implemented as a set of modules extending the Linux kernel. Legacy multi-threaded applications and message-passing based applications developed for an SMP PC running Linux can be executed without re-compilation on a Kerrighed cluster. The proposed demonstration presents a prototype of Kerrighed running on a cluster of four portable PCs. It shows the main features of Kerrighed in global memory, process and stream management by running multi-threaded and MPI applications on top of Kerrighed. © Springer-Verlag 2003.