Cluster Computing Intro

Fall 2003 LSP Conference - Tuesday, October 7th

Speakers
  • Katherine Holcomb (kah3f - ITC Research Computing) - runs the 96 node Aspen cluster and the 32 node Birch cluster. Will discuss the software and support that ITC provides for these two clusters. Will present a Brown Bag talk on 25-Sept-2003 on these clusters. Summary of this talk for the LSP conference.
  • Tom Spraggins (tas - ITC Academic Computing Health Sciences) - runs a 42 node cluster that contains 21 dual CPU Intel/Linux machines and 21 Mac OS X machines. Will talk about integraing the Linux and OS X machines into one cluster. Will describe the gene and protein database search application that runs on his cluster.
  • Bryan Wright (bryan - Physics) - will talk about what Physics does (PDF). He runs several general purpose Linux clusters.
  • Rich Gregory (rtg2t - SEAS) - runs an 18 node cluster with dual CPU Linux machines and a 6 node (10 CPU's total) compute engine Linux cluster. Administers two SGI supercomputers that have 8 and 16 CPU's and huge amounts of shared RAM and a huge shared RAID.
    • Usages
      • Parallel computing
      • Database server with web server frontend
      • Web server
      • File server
      • High Availability server
    • Installation
    • Network - head node
      Two ethernet cards used. One goes to the Internet, one goes to the "inside".
    • Network Medium
      • 100 Mbit/sec Copper
      • 1000 Mbit/sec Copper
      • 1000 Mbit/sec Optical
      • Myrinet - Full-duplex 2+2 Gigabit/sec
    • NIS - logon anywhere on the cluster. Authenticate in one place.
    • NFS - makes a disk look like it mounted everywhere.