Beowulf Clusters at the Institute for Physical Science and Technology

What is a Beowulf cluster?

A Beowulf cluster is a parallel computer built from "off the shelf" computer parts. It is characterized by its scalability, and cost effectiveness. They are classified as MIMD machines (Multiple Instruction Multiple Data).

How many Beowulf clusters are there in IPST?

Currently, there are two Beowulf clusters at IPST

• Nimzo (1999)
  1. General view
  2. Typical node
  3. Gigabit network switch (1000 Mbit/s)
  4. Visualization panel
  5. Keyboard switch

  A typical node in this cluster consists of:

  • 2 x Intel Pentium III - 1.13 GHz
  • SuperMicro P3TDDE motherboard
  • 1 GB SDRAM PC-133 (2 x 512 MB DIMMs)
  • 20 GB hard disk
  • DLINK DGE 500T NIC at 1000 Mbps - PCI
  • 3.5" 1.44 MB floppy drive
  • DVI cards in four machines to support SGI monitors
  • Tower enclosure

  Note that this cluster has undergone one hardware upgrade

• Keckwulf (May 2001)
  1. General view
  2. Power distribution units, 100 Mbit/s switch
  3. Top front view
  4. Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS)
  5. Top back view
  6. Bottom back view (network view)
  7. Software and system screenshot
  8. Node back view, I/O ports
  9. Node top view, general description
  10. Motherboard view
  11. Memory, EIDE and Floppy interfaces
  12. Dual Pentium III at 1GHz (SIMD capabilities)

  A typical node in this cluster consists of:

  • 2 x Intel Pentium III - 1 GHz
  • SuperMicro 370DLE motherboard
  • 2 GB ECC SDRAM PC-133 (2 x 1024 MB DIMMs)
  • 2 x 75 GB IBM ATA/100 EIDE hard drive
  • Intel NIC at 100 Mbps - integrated
  • 3.5" 1.44 MB floppy drive
  • 4 MB PCI graphics card
  • 4U rackmount case with 300 W power supply

• Karman (December 2002)
  

  In this Beowulf cluster, there are two hadware configurations for the nodes, the master node, and the compute node. Master node 2 x Intel Xeon - 2.8 GHz 512 KB cache Tyan S2720UGN with Intel 7500 chipset motherboard 2 GB ECC DDR PC-266 (2 x 1024 MB low profile) 146 GB U320 SCSI 10,000 RPM Seagate hard drive Integrated 10/100, Integrated 10/100/1000 NICs Myrinet 2000 network card Adaptec 29160 PCI SCSI controller (for RAID) 1.6 TB RAID (initial), 2.2 TB RAID (added later) Sony SDX-D700C/BM 100/260 GB external USCSI tape drive 3.5" 1.44 MB floppy drive, 52x IDE CD-ROM drive 4U enclosure Compute node 2 x Intel Xeon - 2.8 GHz 512 KB cache Tyan S2720GN with Intel 7500 chipset motherboard 2 GB ECC DDR PC-266 (2 x 1024 MB low profile) 40 GB ATA/100 7200 RPM Seagata hard drive Integrated 10/100, Integrated 10/100/1000 NICs Myrinet 2000 network card Integrated ATI Rage XL 4MB graphics card 3.5" 1.44 MB floppy drive 1U enclosure