ICE: A Service Oriented Approach to Uniform the Access and Management of Cluster Environments

This paper presents the Integrated Cluster Environment - ICE, which aims to provide an efficient and easy way to interact with several clusters. Generally, when users and clusters administrators have access to several clusters they have to deal with different kind of tools in each cluster. For example: different job schedulers, resource monitoring and administrative configuration issues. Sometimes these tools are used to perform similar tasks but using different interfaces with different parameters. ICE environment provides an alternative to uniform the access to different cluster tools, allowing users and administrators to interact and manage them in a transparent manner. Besides transparency, it also provides extensibility, since tools already installed in clusters can be managed by ICE environment just by adopting the integration framework designed. Uniformity, transparency and extensibility are reached due to ICE architecture and Web service usage as the environment middleware. This paper describes ICE architecture, the developed prototype, ICE usage and also a comparison with related work.