Announcement: Debian cluster tools.

["Jorge L. deLyra" <delyra@fma.if.usp.br>]

Dear Debian users,

This is a general announcement of the availability of a couple of Debian
packages that I have produced and made publicly available in the server

http://sft.if.usp.br/debian-cluster/

They are called cluster-tools-client and cluster-tools-server and contain
tools for dealing with clusters of remotely-booted compute nodes or X11
terminals, which is the most interesting case. The terminals do not have
to be thin clients, they may be full-featured workstations as well. They
may be in a public terminal room or in rooms distributed around a floor.

The core ideas and code contained in these tools are fairly well developed
and have been in use in half a dozen production clusters for a few years.
However, this particular version of the programs is only a few weeks old,
and I consider it to be in beta. There is a fair amount of documentation,
which is all very new. Most of the documentation is available online at

http://cluster.if.usp.br/

People involved with setting up, using, maintaining and managing sets of
identical or at least similar machines, to work as either compute nodes in
a parallel processing cluster, or as X11-capable terminals, may find use
for the programs and ideas contained in these packages. The documentation
contains general explanations of each aspect of the cluster architecture.

The packages were developed and are currently used in Woody, but they are
installable in Sarge as well. These packages are for the i386 architecture
only, but since the tools are implemented as shell scripts, they can be in
fact used in any architecture. All the sources are available and it is a
simple matter to make packages for other architectures, so long as one has
access to appropriate machines. You can install and update these packages
if you include in your /etc/apt/sources-list file the line

deb http://sft.if.usp.br/debian-cluster stable main

For anyone wishing to mirror the site, an rsync module is available. This
is being sent to the Debian lists debian-user and debian-beowulf. Please
feel free to forward it to any other lists that may be appropriate.

							Cheers,

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        Jorge L. deLyra,  Associate Professor of Physics
            The University of Sao Paulo,  IFUSP-DFMA
       For more information: finger delyra@latt.if.usp.br
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