Rocks Cluster Distribution
| Company type | Open source software project |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computer software, High-performance computing |
| Founded | 2000 |
| Founder | National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure, San Diego Supercomputer Center |
| Headquarters | San Diego , United States |
| Products | Linux distribution for HPC clusters |
Rocks Cluster Distribution—initially known as NPACI Rocks—is a Linux distribution tailored specifically for high-performance computing (HPC) clusters. Its development began in 2000 under the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure alongside the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), with funding provided by an NSF grant until 2011.
Distribution
While early versions were built upon Red Hat Linux (RHL), contemporary iterations of Rocks utilize CentOS coupled with a customized Anaconda installation program designed to facilitate large-scale deployment across numerous systems. The distribution incorporates critical HPC components such as the Message Passing Interface (MPI), which CentOS does not include, thus supporting effective cluster assembly.
Users can extend functionality through "Roll CDs," which are user-created packages that integrate smoothly with the core system’s software management and packaging framework. There are over twelve Rolls available, covering tools like Sun Grid Engine (SGE), Condor, Lustre, Java, and Ganglia, all aimed at easing the setup and administration of extensive clusters.
By October 2010, Rocks was deployed in 1,376 clusters spanning academic institutions, governmental agencies, and commercial enterprises globally. The largest academic installation is GridKa, operated by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, featuring 8,632 CPUs. Clusters utilizing Rocks vary widely in size—from fewer than ten CPUs to several thousand—highlighting the distribution’s emphasis on scalability, which aligns with NSF objectives to foster expansive HPC infrastructures and virtualization support.
Release history
| Release Date | Rocks version | CentOS version |
|---|---|---|
| Dec 2017 | Rocks 7.0 | CentOS 7.4 |
| May 2015 | Rocks 6.2 | CentOS 6.6 |
| Apr 2014 | Rocks 6.1.1 | CentOS 6.5 |
| Nov 2012 | Rocks 6.1 | CentOS 6.3 |
See also
- Scientific Linux – Linux distribution developed by Fermilab and CERN
- Cray Linux Environment
- Compute Node Linux
- CNK operating system