The ease use and management of clusters needs tools to install, update and transparently manage distributed clusters resources. The management of clusters (node installations and updates) is a well-known problem and some high performance computing specific distributions are available today. These distributions, like OSCAR, allow users to install and manage clusters without specialized knowledge, allowing quick cluster deployment. The ease use of cluster is possible globally and transparently managing cluster resources. Single System Image (SSI) has this approach and some projects provide a SSI for Linux clusters.

But today, there is no solution combining these two advantages: integration of a SSI and a distribution for high performance computing on Linux clusters. This paper presents SSI-OSCAR which aims at providing such a solution, combining OSCAR and the Kerrighed SSI.