Agents on HPC Linux Clusters

[EHacking]

We are discussing the possibility of putting agents on our HPC (High Power Computing) Linux cluster. We are not sure if we need the agent just on the Head Nodes, or all of the nodes. The Head Nodes are supposedly the only systems with software installed, the other nodes just provide computing power. Has anyone had any experience with HPC clusters and the agent?

[mfranz]

Hi Erick,

No hands on experience here, but I would be interested in the following.

• What are you hoping to find on these machines?
• How you would like to see this data in FNMS?
• What are the licensing use cases you're after?

Best regards,

Markward

[EHacking]

@mfranz,

We are pretty sure they don't have anything else installed on these systems, but just as we have rolled out the agent on almost everything else, we want the agent to report what is on these systems to verify. Our current cluster (LINUX running Red Hat) has three main devices that control over 90 different physical machines, all running SUSE. We want to tie both the operating systems and the applications on the systems to the licensing. There are several very high-cost software packages on the cluster, and we just want visibility as to what is installed.

Hope this helps.
Erick