Mass-Producing Your Certified Cluster Solutions
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Mass-Producing Your Certified Cluster Solutions White Paper The Intel® Cluster Ready program is designed to help you make the most of your engineering Intel® Cluster Ready resources. The program enables you to sell several different types of clusters from each solution High-Performance you design, by varying the hardware while maintaining the same software stack. You can gain a Computing broader range of cluster products to sell without engineering each one “from scratch.” As long as the software stack remains the same and works on each one of the hardware configurations, you can be confident that your clusters will interoperate with registered Intel Cluster Ready applications. Your customers can purchase your clusters with that same confidence, knowing they’ll be able to get their applications up and running quickly on your systems. Intel® Cluster Ready: Mass-Producing Your Certified Cluster Solutions Table of Contents Overview of Production-Related Activities � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 3 Creating and certifying recipes � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 3 Maintaining recipes � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 3 Mass-producing recipes � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 3 Roles and Responsibilities for Certified Cluster Production � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 4 Recipe engineering � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 4 Matching customer orders to recipes � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 5 Manufacturing clusters � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 5 Scenarios for Performing Intel® Cluster Checker Testing. 6 Determining if Intel Cluster Checker Requires Modifications � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 6 Allowable Hardware Variance Categories � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 7 Performance Variances and Cluster Checker Modifications � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 8 Device Omission Variances and Cluster Checker Modifications� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 9 Nominal Variances and Cluster Checker Modifications � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �10 For More Information � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 11 2 Intel® Cluster Ready: Mass-Producing Your Certified Cluster Solutions Many Cluster Products from One Software Stack Application #1 Application #2 Application #3 Software Stack Hardware Hardware Hardware Combination #1 Combination #2 Combination #3 Figure 1. Many cluster products from one software stack Once you have certified a cluster recipe, as long as the software stack stays the same, you can change some of the underlying hardware to create different configurations� Overview of Production-Related Activities For original equipment manufacturers and platform integrators, the Intel® Cluster Ready program can be divided into three types of activities: creating recipes, maintaining recipes, and copying or mass-producing recipes. Creating and certifying recipes Incremental updates to existing software components are allowed, A recipe is a repeatable method of building a cluster. It consists of key but not additions of new software. For example, changing from Red elements that you define: the hardware components, the software Hat* Enterprise Linux* 4, Update 5 (RHEL 4U5) to RHEL 4U6 is an stack, and instructions for building software on the hardware. After allowable refresh. The change can be made without recertification you have created a specific build method, the next step is to certify as long as the recipe continues to pass Intel® Cluster Checker health it on specific hardware. The certification process includes building a checks. However, a change from RHEL 4U6 to RHEL 5U1 would con- cluster using the recipe, and then performing a series of technical steps stitute a new software addition and would trigger recertification of to ensure that the cluster is Intel Cluster Ready–compliant. If the cluster the recipe. passes, your recipe is certified. Having obtained certification for a recipe, Mass-producing recipes you can use it to produce certified clusters for sale to your customers. Manufacturing consists of taking customer orders, matching them to Maintaining recipes your certified cluster recipes, and producing Intel Cluster Ready so- Maintaining a recipe means keeping it current with market needs. lutions based on those certified recipes. Not all customers will order Eventually, a cluster recipe software stack goes out of date and must precisely the same hardware. The program accommodates this reality by be refreshed. It is likely that each of the software components in the allowing a variety of hardware changes, or variances, without requiring stack will go out of date independently of the others. New versions of the solution to be recertified. However, a cluster that contains variances the operating system and other components in the software stack must still pass the Intel Cluster Checker health test before it is released may become available within weeks of the recipe certification. At to the customer. To ensure it will pass, you may have to modify some of some point, you will probably want to upgrade your recipe to the the Intel Cluster Checker settings to reflect those variances. latest versions of the components. 3 Intel® Cluster Ready: Mass-Producing Your Certified Cluster Solutions This guide focuses on the third type of activity, mass-producing Recipe engineering cluster recipes. It is intended to help you translate Intel Cluster Ready Creating cluster recipes, certifying them, and keeping them current by certified recipes into volume cluster sales. means of software refreshes are all part of recipe engineering. Intel suggests that your engineering department establish a recipe devel- Roles and Responsibilities for Certified Cluster opment and deployment process encompassing these activities. Production The engineering team maintains a set of refreshed and certified recipes Roles and responsibilities for producing certified clusters can be sep- that are ready for your company to use in fulfilling customer orders. arated into three functional areas and their corresponding teams of If a software component is added or removed, triggering a recertifi- workers (see Figure 2): engineering, sales, and manufacturing. Your cation, your company’s engineering team handles the recertification company may give these groups different names. Also, multiple roles process. The engineering team should also manage the Intel Cluster in the process may be handled by one department in your company. Checker fingerprint files that are used to verify that a certified cluster matches a recipe. Your engineers must change the fingerprint files whenever software components are added, removed, or refreshed. Taking a Recipe from Engineering to Production Finger cipe prin Verified Copy of a Re t Certified Recipe Recipe Engineering Certified Recipes Build and Verify Process Cluster Cluster Sales “Manufacturing” Orders Customer BOM Figure 2. Taking a recipe from engineering to production The hardware and software portions of a certified cluster both originate with a recipe in the engineering department but take different paths to the end product� The hardware can be altered by the sales team, while the software must match� 4 Intel® Cluster Ready: Mass-Producing Your Certified Cluster Solutions Matching customer orders to recipes Manufacturing clusters The role of the sales team is to take orders from cluster customers Once an order has been matched to a recipe, your company’s manufac- and match each order to one of the certified recipes that your com- turing team uses that recipe and any variances noted by the sales team pany has available. The sales team cannot change the software stack, to build the cluster or clusters for the customer. The manufacturing so team members should try to match orders to certified recipes based team is responsible for obtaining the necessary recipe documentation, on the right software fit. If a software match is not possible, your software, and files to build the ordered cluster. As the cluster is built, the sales team can request a new recipe from your engineers, who team will swap-in any variant hardware components specified by the will then need to develop and certify the recipe. sales team. Although sales team members cannot change the software, they can Your company’s manufacturing team or field installers have the specify allowable hardware variances to meet the customer’s needs. additional responsibility of adjusting Intel Cluster Checker to account For example, the customer may require different processors than the for