Qlustar Basic Edition

Qlustar is a free and commercial operating system based on the Debian GNU/Linux and Ubuntu distributions. It has been designed from the ground up to act as a next-generation, full-fledged, high-performance computing cluster OS that allows you to manager and set up clusters with as minimum efforts as possible.

Features at a glance

Being an extremely customizable and flexible operating system, Qlustar offers controlled on-the-fly node updates, ZFS, Lustre and HA clusters that have been designed for your toughest demands, support for diskless clusters, up-to-date versions of the OpenMPI, Lustre and OFED software packages, as well as state-of-the-art cluster monitoring and management solutions.

In addition, the distribution comes with first-class support, a complete HPC (High-performance computing) cluster Linux distribution that offers over 250 up-to-date packages, including bleeding-edge software, requires no node installation or provisioning, and is real-life proven.

Distributed as an installable-only IMG file

At the moment, Qlustar is distributed for free as an archived IMG file, which has approximately 2 GB in size when extracted. The IMG file must be written on a USB flash drive of 2GB or higher capacity in order to install the operating system on your machines.

Boot options

The boot menu is the first the user sees when booting the Qlustar distribution. From there, he or she can start the installation with normal configuration or by using a TTY console. In addition, you can boot an existing operating system that is installed on the first disk drive detected by the BIOS.

Basic Edition and Commercial (Full) Edition

As mentioned, Qlustar is both a commercial and free operating system. While the Qlustar Basic Edition is distributed for free for non-commercial and purely academic use, the Commercial (Full) Edition of Qlustar Linux costs money and can be purchased from the project’s website (see link below).

What is new in this release:

• Qlustar 8.1.1 is based on Ubuntu 12.04.4 and Debian 7.5. It includes all security fixes and other package updates published before May 8th 2014. Available security updates relevant to Qlustar 8.1.1, that have appeared after this date, will be announced on the Qlustar website and in the Qlustar security news letter.
• New Features:
• QluMan:
• Curve based transport instead of SSL
• is used for the encryption of the network traffic between the QluMan server and the GUI/execution engine. It employs high-speed/high-security elliptic-curve cryptography to protect every packet against espionage, corruption, and sabotage.
• Chroot management:
• Allows creation, cloning and removal of chroots of the supported edge platforms (currently Ubuntu/Precise, Debian/Wheezy). In conjunction with the management of Qlustar images, this makes it possible to setup a completely new OS environment for your nodes from scratch in just a few minutes. Perfect for creating a test environment when preparing new releases or major upgrades/changes.
• ZFS disk configs:
• Pre-configured ZFS disk configs have been made available in the QluMan disk configurator. For new installs, the default disk configuration for net-boot nodes (not head-nodes booting from disk) is now ZFS with compression enabled.
• Cuda 6:
• The brand-new Cuda Toolkit 6 release dramatically simplifies parallel programming by introducing the unified memory feature and pushes throughput with multi-gpu scaling. Cuda 6 is ready to use on all Qlustar platforms (Ubuntu/Precise, Debian/Wheezy).
• Lustre 2.5.1:
• With Lustre 2.5.x, Qlustar provides the most recent Lustre release featuring the very best in the parallel filesystem world. Furthermore, Lustre 2.5.x comes with long-term upstream support. Three of our customers with critical Lustre installations (including a larger HA setup) were already upgraded to this release. It proved rock-stable, running flawlessly for several months while offering a significant performance boost at the same time. We removed support for Lustre 2.4.x since it proved to be too buggy.
• Qlustar tasks:
• Starting with this release, we introduce topic package bundles (Qlustar tasks) each consisting of a collection of packages relevant to a certain field of HPC applications. The first such task packages are qlustar-task-nvidia (provides all components of the latest CUDA toolkit), qlustar-task-debmed-ngs (up-to-date packages from the Debian Med Next generation sequencing category ) and qlustar-task-debmed-imaging (up-to-date packages from the Debian Med image processing category ). Any of the tasks can be selected in the Manage Chroots dialog of the QluMan GUI or installed on the cmdline.
• Kernel Driver Updates:
• Nvidia 319.23 -> 334.21
• Package Version Updates:
• openblas 0.2.6 -> 0.2.8
• OFED libraries 1.5.4 -> 3.12rc1
• OFED opensm 3.3.13 -> 3.3.17
• Critical Bug Fixes:
• QluMan execution daemon can't connect to qlumand
• When a node was reset without a clean shutdown, the qlumand on the head-node wouldn't allow the execution daemon on the nodes to reconnect. This is fixed with the new version of QluMan.
• Miscellaneous bugs in the Lustre client
• The current Qlustar kernel includes a number of critical Lustre client patches a few of them provided by Q-Leap. Amongst others they fix the following bugs (referred to by their upstream bug id)...
• LU-4429: clients leaking open handles/bad lock matching in ll_md_blocking_ast
• LU-4520: Text file busy error -- mainline 3.12 client
• LU-3952: llite_nfs.c:349:ll_get_parent()) ASSERTION( body->valid & (0x00000001ULL) ) failed
• LU-4209: O_LOV_DELAY_CREATE conflict with __O_TMPFILE
• LU-3270: ptlrpcd strnlen crash trying to log a message