1.1 Terminology

Let's start with a few basic terms and concepts, so that everyone is starting out on the same level. The most important is the term cluster, which when mentioned herein refers to a group of individual computers bundled together using hardware and software in order to make them work as a single machine.

Each individual machine of a cluster is referred to as a node. Within the OSCAR cluster to be installed, there are two types of nodes: server and client. A server node is responsible for servicing the requests of client nodes. A client node is dedicated to computation.

An OSCAR cluster consists of one server node and one or more client nodes, where all the client nodes [currently] must have homogeneous hardware. The software contained within OSCAR does support doing multiple cluster installs from the same server, but no documentation is provided on how to do so.



root 2002-11-08