BEOSH: The Beowulf Cluster Shell
Mason Vail and Amit Jain
Boise State University
Boise, Idaho 83702
This material is based upon work
supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0321233.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in
this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect
the views of the National Science Foundation.
The Beowulf Cluster Shell (beosh)
has been created to provide cluster users with a Single System Image
(SSI) by distributing individual commands or pipelined jobs over
available nodes without requiring the user to be aware of where or how
jobs are distributed. Job control of distributed jobs enables
management of multiple concurrent remote jobs from a single shell
session. In addition to SSI features, beosh supports
parallel job execution through pdsh,
a commonly used parallel-only cluster shell. In either
distributed or parallel mode, beosh can limit nodes to
those reserved through a system like the Portable Batch System.
This shell seeks to address the lack of a full-featured, portable
cluster shell that remains despite increasing availability and use of
dedicated, high-performance computer clusters. Many cluster
``shells'', for example, are actually scripts for local shells
executing a sequence of remote commands for user convenience. At
the other extreme are specialized cluster operating systems requiring
commitment of the cluster to a particular operating system and its
included utilities. Between these extremes, there are no choices
for a general-purpose cluster shell comparable to even a basic
single-system shell. Though opportunities for improvement
remain, beosh is already a usable shell providing a
foundation for development of a full-featured, general-purpose shell
for Beowulf clusters.
Beosh was originally developed by Mason Vail as a Masters in Computer Science project under the supervision of Amit Jain. The masters thesis is available here and is a good reference for the details of beosh.
Download beosh tarball: beosh.tar.gz. Installation instructions are included in the tarball.