Chomolangma

Welcome to try out our home-made "super"computer Chomolangma! ¹

This is a beowulf class of parallel computer built recently by our team comprising CW Li, Onyx Wai, ST Luk and YongGun Mao.

It's now up and running though there's still a lot of tuning-up to be done.

What is a beowulf?

Beowulf is a multi computer architecture which can be used for parallel computations. It is a system which usually consists of one server node, and one or more client nodes connected together via Ethernet or some other network. It is a system built using commodity hardware components, like any PC capable of running Linux, standard Ethernet adapters, and switches. It does not contain any custom hardware components and is trivially reproducible. Beowulf also uses commodity software like the Linux operating system, Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) and Message Passing Interface (MPI). The server node controls the whole cluster and serves files to the client nodes. It is also the cluster's console and gateway to the outside world. Large Beowulf machines might have more than one server node, and possibly other nodes dedicated to particular tasks, for example consoles or monitoring stations. In most cases client nodes in a Beowulf system are dumb, the dumber the better. Nodes are configured and controlled by the server node, and do only what they are told to do. In a disk-less client configuration, client nodes don't even know their IP address or name until the server tells them what it is. One of the main differences between Beowulf and a Cluster of Workstations (COW) is the fact that Beowulf behaves more like a single machine rather than many workstations. In most cases client nodes do not have keyboards or monitors, and are accessed only via remote login or possibly serial terminal. Beowulf nodes can be thought of as a CPU + memory package which can be plugged in to the cluster, just like a CPU or memory module can be plugged into a motherboard.

If that seems too technical, look here:

• Parallel computing, as it's name implies, is trying to do more than one thing at the same time and hoping to get the whole job done quicker.
• Beowulf is a number of networked-computers linked together to do parallel computing. They are usually dedicated; i.e., don't serve other purposes like Web serving, etc.
• Beowulf is usually built from off-the-shelf stuff - components you can purchase from any computer shop.
• Most software are open software and freely available, usually under the GNU general public license.

What can it do for you?

There is a ``maybe'', because:

• Your algorithm may not parallelize well (but you can change it); or
• You don't want to spend effort to do the parallelization, for whatever reason (but you can always get somebody to do it for you).

Interested?

• Send mail to ST if you would like to get more information, or are just curious ...
• Get an account and try it out.
• Contribute to the project but ``donating'' your computers that you've got or are going to get in your projects. A beowulf can grow and is scalable.

If you are interested in more technical things, read on.

System setup

Hardware

• Front end

  • 700 MHz Intel P3 (Coppermine) CPU
  • 256 Mb ECC RAM
  • 40 Gb Hard disk
  • 3Com 3C905C (Tornado) NIC
  • ATI Rage video card
  • Sound card: Sorry, no music. I forgot to put it in!!
• Computing nodes: 11

  • 700 MHz Intel P3 (Coppermine) CPU
  • 256 Mb ECC RAM
  • 3Com 3C905C (Tornado) NIC

Software

• It is running Scyld's Beowulf-2 preview version which includes BeoMPI, a MPICH-based implemetation.
• Operating system : GNU/Linux
. Believe it or not, there is no official GNU/Linux site!
• Languages supported: Fortran, C, C++ (based on the gcc suite of compilers) No Fortran95 support because there is no free F95 compiler available yet. (There are commerical F95 compilers. You can contribute by injecting money from you project to buy one if you need F95 support!)

Footnotes:

¹Chomolangma is the Tibetan name for the highest peak on earth.