Free favorable software for linux

Rocks Cluster is a complete "cluster on a CD" solution for x86 and IA64 Red Hat Linux COTS clusters.
Building a Rocks cluster does not require any experience in clustering, yet a cluster architect will find a flexible and programmatic way to redesign the entire software stack just below the surface (appropriately hidden from the majority of users).
Although Rocks includes the tools expected from any clustering software stack (PBS, Maui, GM support, Ganglia, etc), it is unique in its simplicity of installation.
From a hardware component and raw processing power perspective, commodity clusters are phenomenal price/performance compute engines. However, if a scalable ``cluster management strategy is not adopted, the favorable economics of clusters are offset by the additional on-going personnel costs involved to ``care and feed for the machine. The complexity of cluster management (e.g., determining if all nodes have a consistent set of software) often overwhelms part-time cluster administrators, who are usually domain application scientists. When this occurs, machine state is forced to either of two extremes: the cluster is not stable due to configuration problems, or software becomes stale, security holes abound, and known software bugs remain unpatched.
While earlier clustering toolkits expend a great deal of effort (i.e., software) to compare configurations of nodes, Rocks makes complete Operating System (OS) installation on a node the basic management tool. With attention to complete automation of this process, it becomes faster to reinstall all nodes to a known configuration than it is to determine if nodes were out of synchronization in the first place. Unlike a users desktop, the OS on a cluster node is considered to be soft state that can be changed and/or updated rapidly.
This is clearly more heavywieght than the philosophy of configuration management tools [Cfengine] that perform exhaustive examination and parity checking of an installed OS. At first glance, it seems wrong to reinstall the OS when a configuration parameter needs to be changed. Indeed, for a single node this might seem too severe. However, this approach scales exceptionally well, making it a preferred mode for even a modest-sized cluster. Because the OS can be installed from scratch in a short period of time, different (and perhaps incompatible) application-specific configurations can easily be installed on nodes. In addition, this structure insures any upgrade will not interfere with actively running jobs.
One of the key ingredients of Rocks is a robust mechanism to produce customized distributions (with security patches pre-applied) that define the complete set of software for a particular node. A cluster may require several node types including compute nodes, frontend nodes file servers, and monitoring nodes. Each of these roles requires a specialized software set. Within a distribution, different node types are defined with a machine specific Red Hat Kickstart file, made from a Rocks Kickstart Graph.
A Kickstart file is a text-based description of all the software packages and software configuration to be deployed on a node. The Rocks Kickstart Graph is an XML-based tree structure used to define RedHat Kickstart files. By using a graph, Rocks can efficiently define node types without duplicating shared components. Similiar to mammalian species sharing 80% of their genes, Rocks node types share much of their software set. The Rocks Kickstart Graph easily defines the differences between node types without duplicating the description of their similarities. See the Bibliography section for papers that describe the design of this structure in more depth.
By leveraging this installation technology, we can abstract out many of the hardware differences and allow the Kickstart process to autodetect the correct hardware modules to load (e.g., disk subsystem type: SCSI, IDE, integrated RAID adapter; Ethernet interfaces; and high-speed network interfaces). Further, we benefit from the robust and rich support that commercial Linux distributions must have to be viable in todays rapidly advancing marketplace.
Wherever possible, Rocks uses automatic methods to determine configuration differences. Yet, because clusters are unified machines, there are a few services that require ``global knowledge of the machine -- e.g., a listing of all compute nodes for the hosts database and queuing system. Rocks uses an SQL database to store the definitions of these global configurations and then generates database reports to create service-specific configuration files (e.g., DHCP configuration file, /etc/hosts, and PBS nodes file).
Enhancements:
- Rocks v4.3 is released for i386 and x86_64 CPU architectures. New features: Rocks command line - initial release of the Rocks command line which facilitates non-SQL administrative access to the database; PXE First - hosts can now be configured in BIOS with a boot order of CD, PXE, hard disk. Enhancements: based on CentOS 4.5 and all updates as of July 4, 2007; Anaconda installer updated to 10.1.1.63; performance improvement when building torrent files for the Avalanche Installer; database indirects, more flexibility with Rocks variables; Globus updated to gt4.0.4 with web services....

Network Transparent Widgets short from NTW, is a protocol and application framework that allows a single server to serve thousands of remote GUI applications.
The client applications are nearly indistinguishable from local, native applications. The protocol is language and architecture neutral. Server language bindings for C and Java are in heavy development.
Main features:
Speed: Remote apps can run at a speed which is nearly indistinguishable from a locally running application. Since the client draws the widgets natively, its not necessary to transfer graphical data, only widget state data. This can be done asynchronously, so the responsiveness of the UI never suffers.
Persistence: Its just as easy to write the ntw protocol data to disk as it is to the network, so the state of the entire gui application can be easily saved. This also happens transparently, so the developer doesnt have to spend any time loading and saving data. Also, if a network connection dies or the client computer loses power, the application can be restarted from the point of failure at the next connection.
Portability: using the protocol, an ntw server application running on a Unix machine could talk to an ntw client for Windows, and vice versa. So a developer could write a program on Linux that could be run from any OS without any porting necessary. Any language or platform that can read and write data to a network can use the protocol to create gui apps.
Scalability: Since the ntw server does not store or draw widget graphics, the memory and computational overhead of running an ntw application is much less than a comparable X Window application. A low end machine could easily serve hundreds of remote clients.
Productivity: Users can run ntw apps without installing anything but the client. Developers can release new versions of their apps without the users having to do anything, much like a web page.
Reference Implementation:
The current reference implementation of the client implements most of the widgets in the Gtk toolkit, and is written in C using the GTK+ 2.0 toolkit for drawing the widgets and handling events. It compiles and runs on FreeBSD, Linux, and Windows, and likely other Unix variants also. Youll need the GTK+ toolkit installed to run the client, and the GTK+ development headers to compile it.
The source code also include a server reference implementation and a sample server application. The "server" is really a set of C language bindings to functions that create and send ntw widget data. The bindings can be used in much the same way as any other GUI toolkit. See the file "ntwtest.c" for the example application. Its been tested on FreeBSD, Linux, and Windows XP. The server library should compile and run on most systems with a C compiler and support for sockets, without the need for any additional libraries.
The protocol is defined by the two header files, ntw.h and ntw_signals.h. These are C header files that describe exactly the byte layout for each of the widgets and all of the opcodes and events that can be sent.
There are still some widgets missing, and some of the signals raised by GTK are not yet handled in the protocol. This will be fixed in the near future.
Note: Although the reference implementation is coded in GTK, the NTW protocol is designed to be independent of any particular widget toolkit. GTK was picked due to favorable design features and a favorable license.
Enhancements:
- 02JUL06 - Fixed bug in update.c where spin_button was switched with slider
- 02JUL06 - Removed status field from image_buffer widget protocol