Release Digest: General, June 18, 2002

Parallel Research Group, Kasetsart University is proud to
announce the public release of a new version of SCE, SCE 1.5, a
truly integrated scalable computing environment. SCE is distributed
free of charge and includes source code. SCE development is
supported in part by AMD Far East, Inc, Kasetsart University, and
COMPAQ.

SCE 1.5 is available in two forms:

• Full distribution that can be used to build a new diskless
  cluster.
• Software package that can run on NAPCI Rocks clusters and
  RedHat 7.2/7.3 based cluster.

New features in SCE 1.5:

• Fast and automatic installation for diskless cluster
• Support cluster built by NPACI Rocks 2.2.1 (diskfull
  cluster)
• New AMATA technology, provides basic HA support out of the
  box
• Increased stability
• Built-in automatic dependencies check
• new config generation tool for building basic configuration
  files
• Improved performance and many bugs fix
• Builtin computing portal that link to batch scheduler
  (SQMS)

SCE Features

• Powerful system management and monitoring tools
• Parallel unix command
• System health monitoring
• Web and X window interface
• Powerful user-level cluster middleware
• Global process space
• Fast process creation
• Global signal and event service
• Rich set of APIs for developers
• Simple batch scheduling
• System statistics logging

SCE is available from http://www.opensce.org. Bugs report
is can be sent to http://prg.cpe.ku.ac.th/bug/.
Questions or comments can be directed to sce@prg.cpe.ku.ac.th.

Thank you for using SCE software!

What is SCE?

One of the problem with the wide adoption of clusters for
mainstream high performance computing is the difficulty in building
and managing the system. There are many efforts in solving this
problem by building fully automated, integrated stack of software
distribution from several well known open source software. The
problem is that these set of software comes never been designed to
work together as a truly integrated system. With the experiences
and tools developed to build many clusters in our site, we decided
to build an integrate software tool that is easy to use for cluster
user community. These software tools, called SCE (Scalable
Computing Environment), consists of cluster builder tool, complex
system management tool (SCMS), scalable real-time monitoring, web
base monitoring software(KCAP), parallel unix command, and batch
scheduler. These software run on top of our cluster middleware that
provides cluster wide process control and many services. MPICH are
also included. All tools in SCE are designed to be truly integrated
since all of them except MPI and PVM are built by our group. SCE
also provides more than 30 APIs to access system resources
information, control remote process execution, ensemble management
and more. These APIs and the interaction among software components
allows user to extends and enhance SCE in many way. SCE is also
designed to be very easy to use. Most of the installation and
configuration are automated by complete GUI and Web.

Why use SCE?

It is easier to manage cluster than normal remote shell command
by hacked shell script. Also, SCE collects and shows resource usage
statistics for later analyzing. MPI users always get the fresh
update host list. All jobs are queued and scheduled to automated
discovery computing nodes.

How do I find out more about SCE?

There are many papers describing overview of SCE and its
individual components in detail. All of them are available at
http://www.opensce.org.
Questions may be sent to sce@prg.cpe.ku.ac.th for more
information. You can keep track of the development by subscribe to
the mailing list at http://prg.cpe.ku.ac.th/mailman/sce.