Panorama: A Webbased Cluster System Management Tool

1
Panorama A Web-based Cluster System Management
Tool

• Taoying Liu, Dan Meng, Zhiwei Xu
• National Research Center for Intelligent
  Computing Systems,
• Chinese Academy of Sciences

2
Overview

• Panorama is a system administration toolkit of
  Dawning 3000 cluster
• Built by Institute of Computing Technology,
  Chinese Academy of Sciences
• Pure Java
• Single control point of cluster
• Multiplatform AIX, Linux and NT

3
Dawning 3000 (2001/2)
4
Architecture of Dawning 3000
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Functionality

• Monitor--System monitoring tool
• System and user customized events
• Panorama--System administration tool
• User, Remote backup, Network software
  installation
• Accounting, Shutdown/reboot, Configuration
• Spreader--Distributed file explorer
• Dsh--Distributed commands shell
• Unix shell environment
• Flexible group operations

6
Design Issues

• Thin client
• Separate GUI and controller
• lightweight GUI
• Bi-direction communication
• pull style of B/S architecture
• Scalability
• Accommodating clusters from several nodes to
  hundreds of nodes
• Multiple platform

7
Architecture of Panorama
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Portable Agents

• All operations that are relevant with specific
  platform are consolidated in agent.
• Clear interface between system specific and
  system irrelevant operations
• Virtual command standard
• Perl shell scripts

9
Active Pull and Security

• Active Pull
• Client Remote event thread
• Manager Method blocked on event lock
• Security
• JSSE Java Secure Socket Extension
• Security protocol similar with Netscape SSL

10
Grouped Multithread

• Principle
• Less system resource consumption
• Less response time
• Two special cases
• Sequential blocked One thread for all RMI calls.
• Totally paralleled One thread per every RMI
  call.

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Threads Number vs. Memory consumption
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Threads Number vs. Response Time
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Panorama Monitor GUI
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What do we learn?

• System administration tool is the most often used
  utility of cluster
• New requirements proposed from system
  administration tool
• Asynchronous communication facility. Blocked RMI
  is not suitable for parallel operations
• Peer-to-Peer programming model. Much flexible
  style than client-server mode

15
Future work

• Asynchronous communication library
• C and Java programming interface
• Several connection modes UDP, TCP and Temporary
  TCP
• Many asynchronous style
• Remote call without any acknowledgement.
• Remote call with server acceptance
  acknowledgement
• Nonblocked remote call
• Blocked remote call
• Sensible to Cluster of Cluster and Grid
  environments