I am working on my diploma thesis project. I have access to 32Node Dell poweredge HPC cluster system with Linux(Debian i think) installed on it. My first goal is to create web (PHP) app where logged users could see free and busy nodes, turn them on and off. I am planning to do something like this - write some cron daemon that would run every 30seconds or other interval, and it could run ping utility for each node to find out if it is on or off, then write results to some file. Then from my web app i could read the info. Will it be a good solution? What existing for node management solutions are there?