Building a virtual cluster using HPC-Europa2 live DVD

Abstract

The HPC-Europa2 project aims at uniting European scientists from various research areas with their respective scientific peers and collaborating in their specific fields, while making use of supercomputers at Europe's leading High Performance Computing (HPC) centers, i.e. BSC (Spain), CINECA (Italy), CSC (Finland), EPCC (UK), GENCI-CINES (France), HLRS (Germany), and SARA (Netherlands). In order to attract new fields and scientists from otherwise less HPC-involved scientific areas to the project, a live DVD has been built that provides parallel tools and libraries similar to the ones used by the aforementioned HPC centers (e.g. Torque, Paraver, and MPI). Thus, this live DVD emulates the environment of the platforms available at the HPC-Europa2 centers. By running the HPC-Europa2 live DVD under a hypervisor and/or booting from physical computers, users can build a virtual cluster, where they can learn more about parallel programming with recent tools and libraries without going through time-consuming installation procedures. As a result, the HPC-Europa2 live DVD provides a fool-proof e-learning and teaching experience.