Skip to content

What is Grendel?

Diagram

Grendel is a fast, easy to use, and full featured bare metal provisioning system for High Performance Computing (HPC) Linux clusters. Grendel simplifies the deployment and administration of physical compute clusters both large and small. It's developed by the University at Buffalo Center for Computational Research (CCR) with more than 20 years of experience in HPC. Grendel is under active development and currently runs CCR's production HPC clusters ranging from 200 to 1500 nodes.

Key Features

  • DHCP/PXE/TFTP provisioning
  • DNS forward and reverse resolution
  • Automatic host discovery
  • Diskful and Stateless (Live image) provisioning
  • BMC/iDRAC control via RedFish and IPMI
  • Authorized provisioning using Branca tokens
  • Rest API
  • Easy installation (single binary with no deps)

Goals

Grendel had one goal: to be simple to use. Building an HPC Linux Cluster can be quite tedious. Grendel aims to be a modern, easy to use provisioning system for organizations just want to netboot a rack of servers without much fuss.