Proposal for Modifications to the OSCAR Architecture to Address Challenges in Distributed System Management

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.