This are two of the early successful Beowulf clusters.
In the initial stage of Avalon 70 computers were connected through a switch Fast Ethernet (100 Mbps), each with an Alpha processor at 533 MHz, 128 MBytes of RAMand 3.2 GBytes of hard disk (almost 9 GBytes of RAM and more 200 GBytes of storagein total). In the second stage, Avalon has grown to 140 processors
Avalon ranked at #113 on the TOP500 supercomputers list in November 1998, at 48,600 Mflops and in March 2000 Avalon ranked at #265 on the TOP500 list. In July 2001, the end of the top500 list is at 68 Gflops.
Avalon
This cluster was built in the The Alamo National Laboratory in the years 1997-98,was the first in the famous list of 500 fastest computers in the world where ranked 315, the list in the first half of 1998, a fact of great importance, because the clusters found that, besides being cheaper, could compete in performance, at least insome applications, the parallel computers of the most recognized manufacturers in the world.
In the initial stage of Avalon 70 computers were connected through a switch Fast Ethernet (100 Mbps), each with an Alpha processor at 533 MHz, 128 MBytes of RAMand 3.2 GBytes of hard disk (almost 9 GBytes of RAM and more 200 GBytes of storagein total). In the second stage, Avalon has grown to 140 processorsAvalon ranked at #113 on the TOP500 supercomputers list in November 1998, at 48,600 Mflops and in March 2000 Avalon ranked at #265 on the TOP500 list. In July 2001, the end of the top500 list is at 68 Gflops.
Avalon currently provides over 18,000 node-hours of production computing time per week, split among about 10 production users. Avalon provides 4000 node-hours of development time per week for another 40 users.
A little of history...
In April 1998, Avalon performed a 60 million particle molecular dynamics (MD) simulation of shock-induced plasticity using the SPaSM MD code. This simulation ran for a total of 332 hours on Avalon, computing a total of 1.12 x 10 ^16 floating point operations.
Also in April 1998, Avalon performed a gravitational treecode N-body simulation of galaxy formation using 9.75 million particles, which sustained an average of 6.78 Gflops over a 26 hour period.
Talking about costs....
Initial hardware cost of about $300k. Initial software cost of $0. Power and space for the machine are estimated to be about $20k/yr.
All of the hardware and software maintenance on the machine is performed in the spare time of four people, averaging less than 10 man-hours of labor per week
Loki
Loki project was built in The Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico in 1996. This cluster was integrated by 16 Intel Pentium Pro microprocessors and had a sustained performance of over one gigaflops at a cost less than $ 55 000 dollars.
- Intel Pentium Pro 200MHz CPU with 256K integrated L2 cache
- Intel VS440FX (Venus) motherboard, 82440FX (Natoma) chip set.
- Four 8x36 60ns parity SIMMS (128MB per node).
- Quantum Fireball 3240MB IDE Hard Drive.
- Cogent EM400 TX PCI Quartet Fast Ethernet Adapter.
- SMC EtherPower 10/100 Fast Ethernet PCI Network Card.
- S3 Trio-64 1MB PCI Video Card.
This list purchase price of Loki's parts in September 1996 was just over $51,000.
The nodes were connected one to another through the four-port Quartet adapters into a fourth-degree hypercube. Each node is also connected via the SMC adapter to one of two eight-port 3Com SuperStack II Switch 3000 TX 8-port Fast Ethernet switches, which serve the dual purpose of bypassing multi-hop routes and providing a direct connection to the system's front end.
The software that runs this cluster is Linux. It use the standard Linux software tools and the GNU programming tools. The kernel has not been modified from its form in the Linux distribution.
This image is an intermediate stage of a gravitational N-body simulation using 9.75 million particles. It took about three days to compute on Loki at a sustained rate of about 1 Gflop.
This image is an intermediate stage of a gravitational N-body simulation using 9.75 million particles. It took about three days to compute on Loki at a sustained rate of about 1 Gflop.
Lab 8.
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