A Flexible Cluster System for the Management of Virtual Clusters in the Cloud

Cluster computing is a fundamental tool to support enterprise services. It also provides the computing capacity for modelling and simulation research fields. There have been several initiatives to improve the access of the scientific community to the cluster resources that they need. Some of them are focused on specific research field, or they are enterprise grade solutions. In order to overcome this situation and to provide system administrators and users the possibility of deploying specific Virtual Clusters on demand in Cloud, we have developed a new tool called Flexible Cluster Manager (FCM). It allows user selectable cluster configuration packages, and it is very easy to include more software by means of the definition of the deployment workflow. FCM allows changing the software configuration of the deployed cluster on-line, including the support of fixing damaged virtual clusters, i.e clusters that have damaged or missing nodes. The performance of our tool, using commodity hardware, is also presented using serial and parallel deploying of the virtual cluster.

keywords: Virtual clusters, KVM, performance, Apache CloudStack