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SUMMARYHigh-performance computing clusters (commodity hardware with low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnects) based on Linux are rapidly becoming the dominant computing platform for a wide range of scientific disciplines. Yet, straightforward software installation, maintenance, and health monitoring for large-scale clusters has been a consistent and nagging problem for non-cluster experts. The NPACI Rocks distribution takes a fresh perspective on management and installation of clusters to dramatically simplify software version tracking and cluster integration.NPACI Rocks incorporates the latest Red Hat distribution (including security patches) with additional cluster-specific software. Using the identical software tools used to create the base distribution, users can customize and localize Rocks for their site. Strong adherence to widely-used (de facto) tools allows Rocks to move with the rapid pace of Linux development. Version 2.2.1 of the toolkit is available for download and installation. Over 100 Rocks clusters have been built by non-cluster experts at multiple institutions (residing in various countries) providing a peak aggregate of 2 TFLOPS of clustered computing.

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This practices and experience paper describes the coordination, design, implementation, availability, and performance of the Pacific Rim Applications and Grid Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA) Grid Testbed. Applications in high-energy physics, genome annotation, quantum computational chemistry, wildfire simulation, and protein sequence alignment have driven the middleware requirements, and the testbed provides a mechanism for international users to share software beyond the essential, de facto standard Globus core. In this paper, we describe how human factors, resource availability and performance issues have affected the middleware, applications and the testbed design. We also describe how middleware components in grid monitoring, grid accounting, grid Remote Procedure Calls, grid-aware file systems, and grid-based optimization have dealt with some of the major characteristics of our testbed. We also briefly describe a number of mechanisms that we have