Abstract
OSCAR, a tool for the deployment and the management of clusters, has
historically provided a simple Graphical User Interface (GUI) that aims to
hide technical details associated with the management of such distributed
platforms.
The OSCAR GUI followed a fairly monolithic architecture, which was difficult to
extend. Thankfully, OSCAR developers have made deep modifications to the
overall OSCAR architecture to be much more modular, and as a result it is fairly
simple to support OSCAR on new Linux distributions.
However, a few questions remain. Is the present OSCAR architecture suitable
to address current challenges needed for the management of distributed
systems? For instance, is OSCAR providing a tool set that answers the needs
of system administrators?
This document presents a criticism of the present OSCAR architecture in
order to identify current challenges related to distributed system
management. Based on this analysis, we propose a modified version of the
OSCAR architecture that emphasizes simplicity and incremental enhancements.
