Objective: Evaluate feasibility of achieving Gips scale workstation performance with ensembles of commodity personal-computer subsystems in support of Earth and space science requirements (see picture, 90K).
Approach: Demonstrate a high performance and performance-to-cost multiple computer workstation providing high disk I/O bandwidth and disk capacity in support of Earth and space science application demands. Integrate 16 PC subsystems, 16 high capacity low cost disk drives, multiple Ethernets, and high resolution video monitors and drivers. Port the Linux Unix-like operating system to processing nodes. Add necessary software upgrades to Linux to facilitate and improve support for parallel and distribute computing. Promote and support application development on the workstation. Test performance of various applications, algorithms and benchmarks on the workstation.
Accomplishments: A 16 100Mhz 486DX4 microprocessor distributed prototype system has been assembled with dual Ethernets, 256 MBytes of memory, 8 GBytes of disk, and two high resolution monitors. Linux, PVM, and Khoros have been installed. Two parallel application programs have been ported. Initial performance evaluation has been conducted. Performance has been shown in certain cases to be comparable to commercial MPPs of equivalent scale.
Significance: In the spirit of cheaper/better/faster, this project demonstrates the potential of exploiting very inexpensive and widely available components for high performance computing. The Beowulf approach examines the viability of achieving scalable internal communication by means of multiple parallel commodity networks. It moves the disk I/O operating point for users of large datasets from remote file servers over LANs to local n-way parallel direct disk to memory access. Beowulf provides a vehicle for technology transfer as a testbed for evaluating experimental distributed systems software and through Linux distribution channels, disseminating the results of Beowulf software development to a broad user community.
Status/Plans: Since Beowulf will support multiple networks ganged together as one, the appropriate software is being develop so that LINUX can support it. A collaboration with Clemson U. is being worked out to enable Beowulf as a vehical for scalable I/O. An advanced distributed shared memory infrastructure will be developed. A Pentium based demonstration system with 100 Mbps Ethernet channels and 16 Gbyte disk capacity will be assembled.
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