About Warewulf/What's the point?:

Warewulf is a cluster node distribution tool. It facilitates the
administration of cluster nodes by locating a root filesystem  on a single
image and propagate the image to the nodes via boot images distributed via
the network. Warewulf was designed for building Beowulf style clusters, but it 
is capable of building ANY type of cluster nodes (ie. disk IO, database, 
HTTPD, failover).

I built it for several reasons...

 1) There was nothing in the community that solved all of the issues that I
    wanted from a cluster distribution. Scyld was the closest (and I did try
    them), but due to the cost of their support, software updates model and
    lack of being truly customizable they did not work for me.
 2) The idea of having a Linux distro installed on each node was awful to me
    because that means that each node is a point of administration. Yes there
    are tools that facilitate centralized admin. I did not really love any of
    them, and that was only a small part of it. Trouble shooting node problems
    is 10 times easier when you can rule out file system curruption (rebooting
    puts the nodes back in exactly the same configuration as when they were
    built, and all nodes share the same filesystem image).
 3) I needed my cluster distribution to be very easily customizable without
    introducing new levels of complexities. Having the option to choose which
    MPI or PVM to use, kernel, hardware, compilers were all very importatant
    to me. Preconfiguring these items puts too much into the black bag and the
    admins may not know how everything was done (without learning not only the
    implementation, but also the distributions nuances).
 4) I like the idea of the SSI (single system image) but from what I found
    with dealing with scientists, they also like to have the capability of
    logging into slave nodes at times. I built Warewulf to emulate the SSI for
    the administration, but give the users the option.

Here are my prerequisits I had when building Warewulf:

   o Easy (and fast) build process
   o Customizable
   o Scalable administration and implementation
   o Updatable master node Linux distribution (via normal update channels ie. 
     RedHat)
   o Expandable
   o Intuitive
   o Not over-complex (Actually, rather simplistic)
   o Easy for end users to grasp environment
   o Needs to be able to facilitate daily administration (users/groups, etc..)

I built Warewulf for myself to fit these requirements. I do not consider
myself a cluster god but I do know a thing or two about hacking, integration, 
automation and development. As Warewulf started to take shape I did what I 
always do, which is release it to the community hoping that others will not 
only benefit from what I have build, but also possiably contribute back to 
the project with code, documentation, ideas, and success stories. At this 
point, Warewulf has had many people contribute to it, and I thank each of 
them for their time investment.

Feel free to play with it, and let me know what you think. It is currently
(and will probably remain in constant development, so don't get on my case 
about typos and spelling). I will run spell check periodically but feel free 
to contribute documentation.

All other documentation can be found in the docs/ directory.

Warewulf was concieved, written and developed by Greg Kurtzer on many sleepless
nights. If you like the code or ideas, Greg would appreciate some feedback and 
gratitude. Enjoy the code, just don't make a mess.

Questions or comments send to warewulf@caosity.org or directly to Greg at
<GMKurtzer@lbl.gov>.


