Grid System Installation, Management and Monitoring Application

Computing Grid site administrators, responsible for the maintenance of the system must frequently deploy the operating system components and grid services on all the computers in the Grid. In case of huge Grid infrastructures with thousands of computers (nodes) manual deployment of the necessary software on every node is a laborious and time-consuming job. Therefore, administrators need an automated deployment tool that can fulfill (re)installation and (re)configuration tasks in an efficient and consistent way. This paper present an automated deployment tool developed for the maintenance of a gLite-based Grid infrastructure. In order to describe the entire software configuration and to develop a custom installation environment, we used the Puppet configuration management system. The installation is made over the network using the PXE protocol. By using this automated environment, the time needed for incident solving and reconfiguration requests was drastically reduced.