Genders is a static cluster configuration database used for cluster configuration management. It is used by a variety of tools and scripts for management of large clusters. The genders database is accessed by every node in a cluster, either through a networked file system or by replicating the database on every node of the cluster. The database describes the layout and configuration of the cluster so that tools and scripts can sense the variations of cluster nodes. By abstracting this information into a plain text file, it becomes possible to change the configuration of a cluster by modifying only one file.
Whatsup is a cluster node up/down detection utility. It can quickly calculate and output the up and down nodes of a cluster through one of several possible backend tools and several optional cluster node databases. The currently supported backend tools are Ganglia, Cerebro, and Pingd (which can be downloaded as a subpackage of Whatsup). The curently supported cluster databases are genders, gendersllnl (a locally supported LLNL version of genders), and hostsfile (a textfile list of host names). C and Perl libraries for detecting up/down nodes are also included in the package.