HA-OSCAR 1.1 Released – unleashing HA-enhanced Beowulf power

Ruston , Louisiana , July 22, 2005 - The eXtreme Computing Research (XCR) group at Louisiana Tech University is pleased to announce the second public release of HA-OSCAR, HA-OSCAR 1.1 (http://xcr.cenit.latech.edu/ha-oscar). High Availability Open Source Cluster Application Resources (HA-OSCAR) is an open source project that aims toward non-stop services in the High Performance Computing (HPC) environment through a combined power of High Availability and Performance Computing solutions. HA-OSCAR goal is to enhance a Beowulf clustering for mission-critical applications and downtime-sensitive HPC infrastructures. To achieve high availability, HA-OSCAR adopts component redundancy and eliminates single point of failures. In addition, HA-OSCAR incorporates a self-healing mechanism, failure detection and recovery, automatic failover and fail-back.

The 1.1 release supports new high-availability capabilities for Linux Beowulf clusters based on OSCAR 4.1 from the Open Cluster Group (http://www.openclustergroup.org). HA-OSCAR provides an installation wizard GUI and a web-based administration tool that allows users 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 critical resources to the operation of the cluster are always available. New services can be configured and added via a WebMin-based HA-OSCAR administration tool (http://www.webmin.com).

The current version of HA-OSCAR supports Active/Hot standby for the head nodes. Future releases will support grid-aware (globus) architecture, address planned and unplanned downtime and include support for the Distributed Security Infrastructure (http://sourceforge.net/projects/disec, transparent checkpointing and disaster recovery for Beowulf clusters.

About HA-OSCAR

HA-OSCAR is an open source project under GNU Public License. Dr. “Box” Chokchai Leangsuksun is the chief architect and project director of the HA-OSCAR research and development program at Louisiana Tech University . It is a collaboration of the eXtreme Computing Research (XCR) group at Louisiana Tech University , the Network and Cluster Computing (NCC) group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Intel and the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL). More info can be obtained at http://xcr.cenit.latech.edu/ha-oscar.

About the eXtreme Computing Research (XCR) Group:

The XCR@LaTech Laboratory was established in March 2002 by Dr. Chokchai (Box) Leangsuksun. It is a research and education program that is supported and funded by Department of Energy contract DE-FG02-05ER25659 and the Center for Entrepreneurship and Information Technology, Louisiana Tech University . Its research program has extended collaborations with industrial and governmental lab partners.

About the OSCAR:

The OSCAR working group is a consortium of industry, academic and research participants. OSCAR is the product of the OSCAR working group of the Open Cluster Group (OCG). OCG is dedicated to making cluster computing practical. The OCG and its subgroups are open to all.