UWM LSC Group Beowulf System UWM LSC Home Page > Beowulf System > Alpha Beowulf

Introduction Hardware Photographs Benchmarks Software Construction

Introductory Information Our Beowulf has 48 nodes connected by a 100-base T switch.  Each node is a DEC 300XL workstation containing a 300 MHz alpha 21164 CPU with 2Mbytes of cache, and a peak floating point performance of 600 Mflops.  The system has a peak floating point performance of 28.8 Gflops, 8.45 Gbytes of distributed RAM, and 98 Gbytes of distributed disk storage space.  The system was initially set up and running on May 4, 1998. The Beowulf Project Beowulf at NASA/GSFC

Hardware Purchase orders for system components Our vendor's description of the 300 XL Digital Equipment Corporation's Description of the 300 XL The SPEC numbers for the 300 XL Upgrading AlphaBIOS DEC Service Call Methods, Logged Service Calls and a Machine Error Log 3Com's SuperStack II model 3300 Fast Ethernet Switch Testing the DE500 series ethernet cards Hewlett-Packard C1355A DDS-2 SCSI Tape Drive Detailed Hardware Configuration Table (for each machine) Temperature Graph In Machine Room (Past Week)

Photographs of the System Hardware Assembly of the individual machines Some of the people involved in our project Installation The finished product

Single Machine Benchmarks We wrote our own benchmarking code, to test these machines on the sort of tasks we typically perform. This benchmark consists of doing fast fourier transforms (FFTs) of different lengths (if you use our benchmarking program, we would be interested in hearing about your results!) The benchmark code (tarred and gzipped) Benchmark output for the 300 XL with gcc compiler and FFTW library Benchmark output for XL300 with the DEC OSF cc compiler using the FFTW  library Benchmark output for XL300 with the DEC OSF cc compiler using the DXML library Benchmark output for XL300 with ccc compiler, linked to cpml and using FFTW Benchmarks output for XL300 with ccc compiler, linked to cpml and using CXML library Benchmark output for a Pentium Pro 200 Benchmark output for a Pentium II 450 Benchmark output for a Pentium III 500 Benchmark output for a SUN Ultra30 Benchmark comparison table

System Software The Operating System: RedHat Linux RedHat's Homepage Latest Linux source Linux on Alphas Parallel processing: MPI (Message Passing Interface) MPICH (a public-domain MPI implementation) MPI documentation LAM (an MPI programming/development environment)

Construction and Configuration Network Topology Setting up the networking switch Hardware Assembly Building a Master System Building the Proto-Node Automated Node Creation We recently upgraded the operating system from RedHat Linux 4.2 (Biltmore) to RedHat Linux 5.1 (Manhattan). Upgrading a Proto-Node Further modifications of Proto-Node Updating Automated Node Creation Operating System Hacks Package Updates We Have Used Fast Math Libraries (Use and Installation) Menuconfig Bug Fix Autofs Installation Xntpd Installation for Time Synchronization Problems that we have encountered Oops (kernel paging error messages) Things to do & resolve

Page created on: Tue Sep 12 14:38:32 CDT 2000 by duncan

This work supported by NSF grant PHY-9728704