The BIG Cluster

Vital Stats

 The cluster has 36 nodes, which we built ourselves. A big, orange THANK YOU to Chris Boyd, Ryan Harnist, and John Muller for helping us assemble them all.

All of the nodes are identical. Here's the rundown of what went into each node:
In addition, one node has an extra U.S. Robotics 10/100 network card. There are also three 24-port Netgear Gigabit switches.

We've chosen CentOS as our Linux distribution, and we are using Warewulf 2.1 to help us set up and maintain our cluster.

What We've Done

 Besides building the machines, we've tested them all, using Knoppix to make sure they all boot properly. There were a few problems, but nothing major. cAos has been installed on the master node. Warewulf 2.1 has been installed and used to create a 2 node cluster. Matt has resolved the problem of the nodes not being able to recognize their onboard network card. We also switched to CentOS Linux.

June 2, 2004 - We've added 8 more nodes to the cluster. It runs the applications provided with the LAM MPI package. We wanted to test it on a program we wrote, though, so we pulled out the prime finder written by Stacy Hoehn and Michelle Lyman for Parallel Computing last semester. Aside from a bracket/parentheses mishap and a really cool overflow error, the program ran wonderfully.

What We're Doing Now


We're waiting... Warewulf does not currently support the Flat Neighborhood Network topology we'd like to use for our cluster, but they are currently working on it. Within a couple of weeks we should be able to finish the configuration. We also have to wait for our many many Cat 5 cables, which we are ordering in everyone's favorite colors, Blue, Green, and Steve.

Pictures

 See us working, or, if we didn't get a picture when we actually did the work, see us pretending to work and staging the photo.

Anecdote of the Week

 Perhaps the most important ingredient in a successful Beowulf Cluster is a cool name. Gary, Matt, and Michelle were sitting in the research lab, and Gary mentioned the fact that our cluster still had no name. So we started brainstorming names. Gary suggested we look for one in the realm of Science Fiction and named some worthy Sci-Fi movie candidates. Michelle suggested Soylent Green. Matt immediately chimed in with, "Soylent Steve!" When Soylent Green references were made twice within a week or so on Slashdot, it seemed to be a sign from the geek gods. The rest, it seems, is history.

Soylent Steve... It's PURPLE... Well, sort of.