A tool for environment deployment in clusters and light grids

Focused around the field of the exploitation and the administration of high performance large-scale parallel systems, this article describes the work carried out on the deployment of environment on high computing clusters and grids. We initially present the problems involved in the installation of an environment (OS, middleware, libraries, applications...) on a cluster or grid and how an effective deployment tool, Kadeploy2, can become a new form of exploitation of this type of infrastructures. We present the tool's design choices, its architecture and we describe the various stages of the deployment method, introduced by Kadeploy2. Moreover, we propose methods on the one hand, for the improvement of the deployment time of a new environment; and in addition, for the support of various operating systems. Finally, to validate our approach we present tests and evaluations realized on various clusters of the experimental grid Grid5000.