PAR Technologies V5 manual Introduction, History of ParaStation

Chapter 1. Introduction

1.1.What is ParaStation

ParaStation is an integrated cluster management and communication solution. It combines unique features only found in ParaStation with common techniques, widely used in high performance computing, to deliver an integrated, easy to use and reliable compute cluster environment.

The version 5 of ParaStation supports various communication technologies as interconnect network. It comes with an optimized communication protocol for Ethernet that enables Gigabit Ethernet to play a new role in the market of high throughput, low latency communication. Beside Infiniband and Myrinet, it also supports the upcoming 10G Ethernet networks.

Like previous versions, ParaStation5 includes an integrated cluster administration and management environment. Using communicating daemon processes on each cluster node, an effective resource management and single point of administration is implemented. This results in a single system image view of the cluster.

From the user's point of view this cluster management leads to an easier and more effective usage of the cluster. Important features like load balancing, job control and input/output management, common in classical supercomputers, but rarely found in compute clusters, are implemented by ParaStation thus being now also available on clusters.

1.2. The history of ParaStation

The fundamentals of the ParaStation software were laid in 1995, when the ParaStation communication hardware and software system was presented. It was developed at the chair of Professor Tichy at computer science department of Karlsruhe University.

When in 1998 ParaStation2 was presented, it was a pure software project. The communication platform used then was Myrinet, a Gigabit interconnect developed by Myricom. The development of ParaStation2 still took place at the University of Karlsruhe.

ParaStation became commercial in 1999 when ParTec AG was founded. This spin-off from the University of Karlsruhe now owns all rights and patents connected with the ParaStation software. ParTec promotes the further development and improvement of the software. This includes the support of a broader basis of supported processor types, communication interconnect and operating systems.

Version 3 of the ParaStation software for Myrinet is a rewrite from scratch now fully in the responsibility of ParTec. All the know-how and experiences achieved from the former versions of the software were incorporated into this version. It was presented in 2001 and was a major breakthrough with respect to throughput, latency and stability of the software. Nevertheless it is enhanced constantly with regard to performance, stability and usability.

In 2002 the ParaStation FE software was presented opening the ParaStation software environment towards Ethernet communication hardware. This first step in the direction of independence from the underlying communication hardware brought the convenient ParaStation management facility to Beowulf clusters for the first time. Furthermore the suboptimal communication performance for large packets gained from the MPIch/P4 implementation of the MPI message passing interface, the de facto standard on Beowulf clusters, was improved to the limits that may to be expected from the physical circumstances.

With ParaStation4 presented in 2003 the software became really communication platform independent. With this version of the software even Gigabit Ethernet became a serious alternative as a cluster interconnect due to the throughput and latency that could be achieved.

ParaStation5 Administrator's Guide 1