The eXtreme Computing Research (XCR) group at Louisiana Tech University (XCR@LaTech) has announced the first public release HA-OSCAR 1.0 beta (http://xcr.cenit.latech.edu/ha-oscar).

High Availability Open Source Cluster Application Resource (HA-OSCAR) is an open source project under Gnu Public License that aims toward non-stop services in the HPC environment through a combined power of High Availability and Performance Computing solutions.

The project's goal is to enhance a Beowulf cluster system for mission-critical applications and downtime-sensitive HPC infrastructures. To achieve high availability, component redundancy is adopted in HA-OSCAR cluster to eliminate single point of failures, especially at the head node. HA-OSCAR also incorporates a self-healing mechanism; failure detection & recovery, automatic failover and fail-back.

The 1.0 beta release supports new high-availability capabilities for Linux Beowulf clusters based on OSCAR 3.0.  It provides an installation wizard GUI and a web-based administration tool that allows a user to create and configure a multi-head Beowulf cluster.  A default set of monitoring services are included to ensure that critical services, hardware components and important resources are always available at the control node. New services can be configured and added via a WebMin-based HA-OSCAR administration tool.

The current version of HA-OSCAR supports Active/Hot standby for the head nodes. Our next year release, under code name “ImmO®” (a.k.a. immortal) cluster system, will support n+m Active/Active multi-head architecture, as well as address both planned and unplanned downtime.  In addition, the release will handle disaster recovery for Beowulf clusters and other cluster systems such as ROCK, Scyld and others.

Further information on Open Source cluster research at the Open System Lab may be located from the following web site http://www.linux.ericsson.ca.

• Toward Highly Available Linux Clusters