== Automatic Power Control ==

One key design component of the new [wiki:LimulusCase Limulus Case] is software controlled power to the nodes. This feature will allow nodes to be powered-on only when needed. As an experiment, a simpel script was written that monitors the Grid Engine queue. If there are jobs waiting in the queue, nodes are powered-on. Once the work is done (i.e. nothing more in the queue) the nodes are powered off).

As an example, an 8 core job was run on the Norbert cluster (in the Limulus case). The head node has 4 cores and each worker node has 2 cores for a total of 10 cores. An 8 node job was submitted via Grid Engine with only the head node powered-on. The script noticed the job waiting in the queue and turned on a single worker node to give 6 cores total, which were still not enough. Another node was powered-on and the total cores reached 8 and the job started to run. After completeion, the script noticed that there was nothing in the queue and shutdown the nodes. 

== Update January 2011 == 
The following is a list of basic cluster RPMS that will be included in the software stack. The base distribution will be Scientific Linux.

 * [https://www.scientificlinux.org/ Scientific Linux V5.4]
 * [http://www.perceus.org/ Perceus Cluster Toolkit] - Cluster administration 
 * [http://www.llnl.gov/linux/pdsh/pdsh.html PDSH] - Parallel Distributed Shell for collective administration
 * [http://gridengine.sunsource.net Sun Grid Engine] - Resource Scheduler 
 * [http://www.clusterresources.com/pages/products/torque-resource-manager.php Torque] - Alternative/Optional Resource Scheduler (previously Open PBS)
 * [http://ganglia.sourceforge.net Ganglia] - Cluster Monitoring System 
 * [http://gcc.gnu.org GNU Compilers] (gcc, g++, g77, gdb) - Standard GNU compiler suite
 * [http://modules.sourceforge.net Modules] - Manages User Environments 
 * [http://www.csm.ornl.gov/pvm/pvm_home.html PVM] - Parallel Virtual Machine (message passing middleware)
 * [http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/mpich2 MPICH2] - MPI Library (message passing middleware)
 * [http://www.open-mpi.org OPEN-MPI] - MPI Library (message passing middleware)
 * [http://math-atlas.sourceforge.net ATLAS] - host tuned BLAS library
 * [http://www.fftw.org FFTW] - Optimized FFT (2-MPI,3) library
 * [http://www.netlib.org/fftpack FFTPACK] - FFT library
 * [http://www.netlib.org/lapack LAPACK and BLAS] - Linear Algebra library
 * [http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl GNU GSL] - GNU Scientific Library (over 1000 functions)
 * [http://www.basement-supercomputing.com/content/view/19/45 Userstat] - a "top" like  job queue/node monitoring application
 * [http://www.clustermonkey.net//content/view/38/27 Beowulf Performance Suite] - benchmark and testing suite