At the SC2003 conference on high-performance computing held last week in Phoenix, many of the world’s leading vendors of hardware, software and systems had their latest and greatest on display. While many booths relied on glitz and giveaways to attract attention, Berkeley Lab offered proven expertise through a variety of demonstrations and presentations.

Among them was Warewulf, a cluster implementation toolkit that facilitates the process of cluster installation and long-term administration on systems running the Linux operating system. Warewulf, written by Greg Kurtzer of ITSD’s UNIX Systems Group, makes clusters easy to build, customize, implement and maintain. Because of its centralized administration features and extensibility, Warewulf has become the standard cluster implementation tool for the Scientific Cluster Support project at LBNL, along with several other organizations.

Demonstrations using Warewulf to set up a small cluster were given in the Berkeley Lab booth by Greg Kurtzer and Gary Jung. Greg also gave a short talk on Warewulf in the booth and among those in the audience was Doug Eadline, editor of the just-launched ClusterWorld magazine (which also included a short item on Warewulf in its inaugural issue) and Tim Mattox, chief architect of the KASY0 (A Warewulf powered Linux cluster that recently became the first supercomputer to break the $100 per GFLOP price barrier).

Learn more about Warewulf in a handout prepared for SC2003 or by visiting the Warewulf web site at http://warewulf-cluster.org/. Warewulf is released under the open source GNU Public License, and community usage and development are encouraged.