Tools for SCI Clusters

When planning the purchase of a compute cluster, usually much thought is spent on the choice of compute nodes, interconnects, switches, and—to a lesser extent—the operating system and system software. Important software tools for system configuration, user administration, fault tolerance, debugging, and monitoring are often overlooked. While in small systems, this does not matter too much, the lack of suitable software tools might become a nightmare, though, when trying to operate compute clusters for a large, diverse user community. The following three chapters deal with tools.