Fully Automated Installation (FAI) is a group of shell and Perl scripts that install and configure a complete Linux distribution quickly on a large number of computers.
It's the oldest automated deployment system for Debian.
[1] FAI allows for installing Debian and Ubuntu distributions.
In the past it supported Scientific Linux Cern.
[6] Similar software exists for Red Hat (Kickstart), SuSE (AutoYaST, YaST and alice), Solaris (Jumpstart) and likely other operating systems.