Grendel: Bare Metal Provisioning System for High Performance Computing

The Center for Computational Research (CCR) at the University at Buffalo has developed Grendel: a fast, easy to use, bare metal provisioning system for High Performance Computing (HPC). Grendel simplifies network booting racks of compute nodes by providing a robust PXE boot server, rest API, and node management in a single binary for easy installation. In this paper, we describe CCR’s HPC network architecture and how Grendel was used to provision the center’s Linux based compute clusters. We also present some modern features built into Grendel including automatic host discovery, deploying Live OS images to bare metal compute nodes, and delivering kernel, initramfs, and other provisioning assets using access tokens and trusted HTTPS.