Comet Way's Beowulf Project

Description:

The Beowulf Project at Comet Way is an independently funded Research project for advances in Parallel Computing. Seeing as how inexpensive older, slower computers are, we are building a Beowulf cluster out of slow cheap computers and running large applications on them behind our firewall. Many of these applications will have to be ported to run on Beowulf, but ultimately, benchmarks will be run and cost / performance ratios recorded. One of the main incentives of this project is running Java on Beowulf, taking advantage of the distribution provided by the native system.

Phase 1

Build the cluster
Run java.
Run distributed versions of cpu intensive application. (VIA 2.0)
Run preliminary benchmarks.
Phase 2

Increase the cluster size to 8.
Increase the number of distributed applications and benchmarking.
Run benchmarks and compare with preliminary results.
Phase 3

Increase the cluster size to 16+.
Continue the research and development of distributing applications.
Run benchmarks.
Conclusions.

Goals:

Efficiency for Maximum Effect
Using machines deemed 'unusable' by today's commercial standards as nodes in the Super Computer, porting modern applications to beowulf (Java for example) will prove that slow, extremely inexpensive, machines can run large applications at reasonable speeds. The distribution must be clean, the networking fast, the the over model simple in order for a the cluster to be efficient.
Distribute Java
Using PVM, distribute java code or allow an easy point of access to distributing large amounts of undistributed java code.
Beowulf porting project
Move many of the more common applications for Linux to beowulf.

Current Status:

Money spent on the cluster:

Required purchase	Number of Items	Price per Item
3Com 3c905B-TX Fast Ethernet XL PCI card	5	$75
Refurbished 486DX2-66, 4 ISA & 2 PCI slots, 8M RAM, onboard SVGA, 1.44M Floppy	4	$30
Maxtor Lightning HD, 350M	3	$70
8-port Fast Ethernet Smart Hub	1	$115

All the rest of the parts were salvaged.

Estimated Price of salvaged parts: $200.
Total cost of software and installation: FREE.
Total cost of Beowulf Cluster: $1020.

Current running arrangement:

Routing
Netgear Fast Ethernet 100Base-TX, 8 ports.
NODE 1
486DX2-66,
16M RAM, 450M+120M SCSI fs space, 128M SCSI swap space, 100Base-TX Ethernet (to rest of cluster) on PCI bus, 10Base-T Ethernet (to gateway) on ISA bus, Linux 2.0.36 kernel on i486, Serves /usr partition, hosts /scratch patrition.
NODE 2
486DX2-66,
8M RAM, 222M IDE fs space, 128M IDE swap space, 100Base-TX Ethernet (to rest of cluster) on PCI bus, Linux 2.0.36 kernel on i486, hosts /scratch patrition.
NODE 3
486DX2-66,
8M RAM, 222M IDE fs space, 128M IDE swap space, 100Base-TX Ethernet (to rest of cluster) on PCI bus, Linux 2.0.36 kernel on i486, hosts /scratch patrition.
NODE 4
486DX2-66,
8M RAM, 254M IDE fs space, 128M IDE swap space, 100Base-TX Ethernet (to rest of cluster) on PCI bus, Linux 2.0.36 kernel on i486, hosts /scratch patrition.
NODE 5
486DX2-66,
8M RAM, 222M IDE fs space, 128M IDE swap space, 100Base-TX Ethernet (to rest of cluster) on PCI bus, Linux 2.0.36 kernel on i486, hosts /scratch patrition.

All the NODES have X11 installed as well as all the X dev libraries, C/C++ dev, and the standard libriries. All machines have:

PVM 3.3.11
MPI CH 1.1.0
POV 3.01
LAM 6.1
ParaLogic BERT 1.04
libperf 0.3
NAG Fortran 90 2.2a

jonlin@andrew.cmu.edu