PAR Technologies PARASTATION5 V5 - Manual (Page 5)

ParaStation5 Administrator's Guide 1
Chapter 1. Introduction
1.1. What is ParaStation
ParaStation is an integrated cluster management and communication solution. It combines unique features
only found in ParaStation with common techniques, widely used in high performance computing, to deliver
an integrated, easy to use and reliable compute cluster environment.
The version 5 of ParaStation supports various communication technologies as interconnect network. It
comes with an optimized communication protocol for Ethernet that enables Gigabit Ethernet to play a new
role in the market of high throughput, low latency communication. Beside Infiniband and Myrinet, it also
supports the upcoming 10G Ethernet networks.
Like previous versions, ParaStation5 includes an integrated cluster administration and management
environment. Using communicating daemon processes on each cluster node, an effective resource
management and single point of administration is implemented. This results in a single system image view
of the cluster.
From the user's point of view this cluster management leads to an easier and more effective usage of
the cluster. Important features like load balancing, job control and input/output management, common in
classical supercomputers, but rarely found in compute clusters, are implemented by ParaStation thus being
now also available on clusters.
1.2. The history of ParaStation
The fundamentals of the ParaStation software were laid in 1995, when the ParaStation communication
hardware and software system was presented. It was developed at the chair of Professor Tichy at computer
science department of Karlsruhe University.
When in 1998 ParaStation2 was presented, it was a pure software project. The communication platform
used then was Myrinet, a Gigabit interconnect developed by Myricom. The development of ParaStation2
still took place at the University of Karlsruhe.
ParaStation became commercial in 1999 when ParTec AG was founded. This spin-off from the University
of Karlsruhe now owns all rights and patents connected with the ParaStation software. ParTec promotes
the further development and improvement of the software. This includes the support of a broader basis of
supported processor types, communication interconnect and operating systems.
Version 3 of the ParaStation software for Myrinet is a rewrite from scratch now fully in the responsibility
of ParTec. All the know-how and experiences achieved from the former versions of the software were
incorporated into this version. It was presented in 2001 and was a major breakthrough with respect to
throughput, latency and stability of the software. Nevertheless it is enhanced constantly with regard to
performance, stability and usability.
In 2002 the ParaStation FE software was presented opening the ParaStation software environment towards
Ethernet communication hardware. This first step in the direction of independence from the underlying
communication hardware brought the convenient ParaStation management facility to Beowulf clusters for
the first time. Furthermore the suboptimal communication performance for large packets gained from the
MPIch/P4 implementation of the MPI message passing interface, the de facto standard on Beowulf clusters,
was improved to the limits that may to be expected from the physical circumstances.
With ParaStation4 presented in 2003 the software became really communication platform independent.
With this version of the software even Gigabit Ethernet became a serious alternative as a cluster
interconnect due to the throughput and latency that could be achieved.