Nodes

In IBM® Platform Cluster Manager Community Edition, the system infrastructure contains different types of nodes, including: management nodes, compute nodes, monitored nodes, and unmanaged nodes.

A management node is the first node that is installed in your system. Every system requires a management node. It controls the rest of the nodes in the system. In previous versions of Platform Cluster Manager Community Edition, this node is also called the head node or master node. A management node acts as a deployment node at the user site and contains all of the software components that are required for running the application in the cluster. After the management node is connected to a cluster of nodes, it provisions and deploys the compute nodes with client software.

The software that is installed on the management node provides the following functions:
  • Administration, management, and monitoring of the cluster
  • Installation of compute nodes
  • Stateless and stateful management
  • Repository management and updates
  • Cluster configuration management
  • Provisioning templates management
  • Acting as a firewall to shield the cluster from external nodes and networks Acting as a server for many services such as DHCP, TFTP, HTTP, and optionally DNS, LDAP, NFS, and NTP

Compute nodes are designed for computationally intensive applications to satisfy the functional requirements of planned use cases. The compute node is provisioned and updated by the management node and performs the computational work in a cluster. After the compute node is provisioned, it is installed with the operating system (OS) distribution, and other custom software (as defined by user). The compute node can have some local disk for the OS and temporary storage that is used by running applications. The OS might also be configured as booted on diskless system to improve I/O performance (by using stateless provisioning).

The compute nodes also mount NFS or can be configured with Spectrum Storage for shared storage. This is facilitated by the connectivity to a high-speed interconnect network. Some applications do not require large disk storage on each compute node during simulation. However, large models might not fit in the available memory and must be solved out-of-core and then can benefit from robust local storage.

Monitored nodes are nodes that are not provisioned by a management node. Monitored nodes have a monitoring agent that is installed and joins the Platform Cluster Manager Community Edition cluster.

Unmanaged nodes are any nodes that are not provisioned by a management node, but are known by the Platform Cluster Manager Community Edition cluster.