Introduction
The often untold story about HPC is configuration management. When it comes to administering even small HPC clusters, configuration management is key. Since this happens in the background, most users are not aware of all the efforts to keep a cluster up-to-date, all nodes in sync, and to react to users' demands for specific settings.
There are almost as many ways to fulfill this task, as there are HPC systems.
Key Questions
In the next hpc-ch forum we will discuss questions like:
- which configuration management tools have been proved to be useful?
- which caveats can be found in managing HPC clusters?
- is it preferable to use preconfigured configurations or to define the configuration management from the scratch? Is there a middle ground?
- which role are configuration management databases (CMDB) playing?
- which new aspects in configuration management have been brought-in by containerization and container orchestration (e.g. Kubernetes)?
- what are your experiences with configuration management systems?
