The BOBCAT Cluster

Introduction

BOBCAT ("Budget-Optimised Beowulf Cluster using Affordable Technology") is a small (16-node) Beowulf-type PC cluster using commodity hardware components intended to develop expertise in the area and provide an in-house computing resource for staff and TRACS visitors. In order to keep the costs low, BOBCAT uses an Ethernet-based cluster interconnect and mid-range processors. Construction of the cluster commenced in February 2000 and BOBCAT was fully operational by the end of April 2000. The total cost of the cluster hardware was under £16000.

Technical specifications

The cluster consists of 16 diskless compute nodes plus one front-end/NFS server system. The cluster interconnect consists of two 100base-TX Fast Ethernets, one for system traffic (NFS etc.) and the other for application traffic (eg. MPI). The compute nodes each comprise a 650MHz AMD Athlon processor on a Gigabyte GA-7IX motherboard, with 128Mb of ECC SDRAM(*) and two 3Com 3C905B Fast Ethernet cards. The system and application Ethernets employ a 3Com SuperStack II hub and switch respectively. All nodes run Red Hat Linux, the diskless compute nodes using the Etherboot network booting software. The cluster is housed in 19in rack-mount enclosures mounted in two cannibalised Meiko M60E cabinets.
(*) currently awaiting upgrade to 256Mb.

Software

BOBCAT has the following compilers installed: gcc/g++ 2.91.66, g77 0.5.24 and Portland Group PGF77/PGF90/PGHPF 3.1. The PVM 3.4.3 and MPICH 1.2.0 message-passing libraries are also installed, the latter configured for gcc, g++, PGF77 and PGF90.

Documentation

• User Guide: HTML, LaTeX, DVI, PostScript, PDF
• System Administration Guide: HTML, LaTeX, DVI, PostScript, PDF

Webpage maintained by www@epcc.ed.ac.uk