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™ running AIX in a High Performance Computing (HPC) environment.

This book provides information to help you:

- Understand, from a broad perspective, a new clustering management architecture. We emphasize 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 solution to migrate from existing CSM configurations to xCAT-managed clusters for IBM System p platforms running AIX.

Part 1. Introduction

Chapter 1. Introduction to clustering

Chapter 2. xCAT 2 architecture

Chapter 3. CSM and xCAT functional comparison

Part 2. Implementation

Chapter 4. CSM To xCAT 2 transition

Chapter 5. Installing xCAT 2 on a new cluster

Part 3. Managing

Chapter 6. xCAT 2 - advanced administrative topics

Appendix A. Configuring syslog-ng

Appendix B. Additional material