GXP : An Interactive Shell for the Grid Environment

We describe GXP, a shell for distributed multi-cluster environments. With GXP, users can quickly submit a command to many nodes simultaneously (approximately 600 milliseconds on over 300 nodes spread across five local-area networks). It therefore brings an interactive and instantaneous response to many cluster/network operations, such as trouble diagnosis, parallel program invocation, installation and deployment, testing and debugging, monitoring, and dead process cleanup. It features (1) a very fast parallel (simultaneous) command submission, (2) parallel pipes (pipes between local command and all parallel commands), and (3) a flexible and efficient method to interactively select a subset of nodes to execute subsequent commands on. It is very easy to start using GXP, because it is designed not to require cumbersome per-node setup and installation and to depend only on a very small number of pre-installed tools and nothing else. We describe how GXP achieves these features and demonstrate through examples how they make many otherwise boring and error-prone tasks simple, efficient, and fun