Using BProc

Forrest Hoffman

Tuesday, February 1st, 2005

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This month’s column focuses on building and using Beowulf Distributed Process Space (BProc) software used by the commercial Scyld Beowulf and the Clustermatic Linux distributions for high performance computing (HPC) clusters. BProc provides a single process space across an entire cluster of slave or compute nodes, meaning that all application processes show up in the process table of the master node and can be controlled from the master even though they’re actually running on slave nodes.

BProc consists of a set of kernel patches, kernel modules, master and slave daemons, and client programs used to start, migrate. and manage application processes across the entire cluster. A library of BProc system calls is also available for controlling process migration and performing a variety of functions on cluster nodes. In addition, commands are provided for running programs on and copying files to individual nodes or all nodes at once.

The History of BProc

First developed about five years ago on a 64-node cluster at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) by Erik Hendriks and colleagues, BProc initially provided a means for observing and controlling remote processes. Using ghost processes on a master (front end) node to represent processes executing on remote slave nodes, it offered an early step toward a single system image (SSI) running across a Linux cluster. The ability to remotely fork processes on compute nodes through process migrate was added later by the group at Goddard.

Dan Ridge, also at NASA, was the first to build a cluster with…

1. GP-GPUs: OpenCL Is Ready For The Heavy Lifting
2. HPC Madness: March Is More Cores Month
3. HPC Turn-Offs: Power Control
4. The Cost to Play: CUDA Programming
5. The HPC Software Conundrum