This IBM® Redbooks® publication positions the new Extreme Cluster Administration Toolkit 2.x (xCAT 2) against the IBM Cluster Systems Management (CSM) for IBM Power Systems™ and IBM System x™ in a High Performance Computing (HPC) environment.

This paper provides information to help you:

- Understand, from a broad book perspective, a new clustering management architecture. The paper emphasizes the benefits of this new solution for deploying HPC clusters of large numbers of nodes.

- Install and customize the new xCAT cluster management in various configurations.

- Design and create a book solution to migrate from existing CSM configurations to xCAT-managed clusters for various IBM hardware platforms.

Chapter 1. Introduction

Chapter 2. xCAT 2 architecture

Chapter 3. CSM to xCAT 2 transition

Chapter 4. Installing xCAT 2 from scratch on diskful nodes

Appendix A. Additional material