Open Source Solutions for Installation and Management of PC Clusters under Linux for ATLAS

In this report the principal Open Source software solutions currently available for the installation and management of clusters of PCs under the operating system Linux are reviewed and evaluated. The software packages analyzed are: NPACI Rocks, OSCAR, OpenMosix and EU-DataGrid Fabric Management Project. In order to evaluate and compare the considered solutions, a set of criteria are proposed about the minimal desirable functionality that any software for the installation and management of clusters must provide. The proposed questions are organized into four different groups: installation, configuration, monitoring and management. How the selected software solutions deal with those questions is analyzed.