Warewulf is a Linux cluster solution that is scalable, flexible and easy to use. Managing and distributing Linux systems to any number of nodes becomes a simple master / slave relationship. Warewulf is the first of its kind which elegantly solves many of the problems associated with administration and scalability. It is a proven technology and has been used for years on both production and development cluster systems.

Warewulf facilitates the process of installing a cluster and long term administration. It does this by changing the administration paradigm to make all of the slave node file systems manageable from one point, and automate the distribution of the node file system during node boot. It allows a central administration model for all slave nodes and includes the tools needed to build configuration files, monitor, and control the nodes. It is totally customizable and can be adapted to just about any type of cluster. From the software administration perspective it does not make much difference if you are running 2 nodes or 500 nodes. The procedure is still the same, which is why Warewulf is scalable from the admins perspective. Also, because it uses a standard chroot'able file system for every node, it is extremely configurable and lends itself to custom environments very easily.

While Warewulf was designed to be a HPC solution, it is not an HPC solution in itself. Warewulf is more along the lines of a distributed Linux flavor, or more specifically a system for replicating and managing small, lightweight Linux systems from one master. Using Warewulf, HPC packages such as LAM-MPI/MPICH, SGE, PVM, etc... can be easily deployed throughout the cluster. Aside from HPC Warewulf has also been used for Web clusters (Both HA and load balanced), management of workstations in LAB (similiar to the LTSP Project), disk IO clusters, databases, security (active/inline intrusion detection and vulnerability scanning clusters), etc...

Warewulf solves the problem of slave node management rather then being a strict HPC specific solution (even though it was designed with HPC in mind). Because of this it is as flexible as a home grown cluster, but administratively scales very well.