Automating Provisioning of Complete Software Stack in a Grid Environment
Bikash Agarwalla, Vanish Talwar, Sujoy Basu, Rajnish Kumar · 2004
With scaling of data centers, clusters, and grids, it is going to be increasingly difficult to download, configure, install, update, and manage the software stack on the constituent nodes. Automation of this process is needed for the system to scale beyond a few hundred nodes. We present system architecture for a middleware service that performs this task in an automated manner. We propose that various components of our architecture can be implemented as grid services with clearly defined interfaces. Furthermore, we demonstrate the usefulness of the architecture through sequence diagrams and a prototype implementation. Our prototype implementation automates the whole process of provisioning a complete software stack by integrating various existing solutions, such as kickstart and smartfrog, along with building intelligence into the middleware to handle such tasks. Preliminary experimental results show that the installation time increased slowly at an acceptable rate of 30 % as we moved from 1 machine to 6 machines. 1