NPACI Rocks: tools and techniques for easily deploying manageable Linux clusters

High‐performance computing clusters (commodity hardware with low‐latency, high‐bandwidth interconnects) based on Linux are rapidly becoming the dominant computing platform for a wide range of scientific disciplines. Yet, straightforward software installation, maintenance, and health monitoring for large‐scale clusters has been a consistent and nagging problem for non‐cluster experts. The NPACI Rocks distribution takes a fresh perspective on management and installation of clusters to dramatically simplify software version tracking and cluster integration.