Preface

Welcome to the Scyld ClusterWare Reference Guide. This document describes Scyld ClusterWare commands that can be invoked by the ordinary user and the maintenance utilities that are intended for the cluster administrator. It also provides in-depth information on the configuration file /etc/beowulf/config and the cluster node file system table /etc/beowulf/fstab. The document also includes an extensive library/function reference for the beostat Beowulf Status library and the BProc Beowulf Process Control library.

The Scyld Beowulf functionality is implemented through several packages, notably the following:

• The BProc package, which implements the Scyld BProc unified process space functionality.

• The libbeostat package, which monitors the state of the compute nodes and gathers performance metrics, making these metrics available through a library API.

This Reference Guide is written with the assumption that the reader has a background in a Linux or Unix operating environment. Therefore, this document does not cover basic Linux system use, administration, or application development.