Title :
NAS experiences with a prototype cluster of workstations
Author :
Castagnera, K. ; Cheng, D. ; Fatoohi, R. ; Hook, E. ; Kramer, B. ; Manning, C. ; Musch, J. ; Niggley, C. ; Saphir, W. ; Sheppard, D. ; Smith, M. ; Stockdale, I. ; Welch, S. ; Williams, R. ; Yip, D.
Author_Institution :
NAS Syst. Div., NASA Ames Res. Center, Moffett Field, CA, USA
Abstract :
This paper discusses the year-long activity at NAS to implement a large, loose cluster of workstations from the existing Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) pool of systems. Issues related to establishing a loosely coupled cluster of workstations are presented. Included are steps needed to resolve system management issues intended to provided reasonable cycle recovery from these systems without disrupting the primary system users. Performance evaluation tests were run based on the NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB) and other codes, including OVERFLOW-PVM, a full-fledged computational fluid dynamics (CFD) application. This paper summarizes the activities related to the prototype cluster and identifies areas that need improvement, development, and research in order to make workstation clusters a viable computing environment for solving aeroscience problems
Keywords :
distributed processing; fluid dynamics; message passing; performance evaluation; physics computing; workstations; NAS; NAS Parallel Benchmarks; OVERFLOW-PVM; Silicon Graphics; aeroscience problems; computational fluid dynamics; cycle recovery; loosely coupled cluster; performance evaluation; primary system users; prototype cluster; system management issues; workstation cluster; Benchmark testing; Computational fluid dynamics; Contracts; Distributed computing; NASA; Pervasive computing; Prototypes; Silicon; Sun; Workstations;
Conference_Titel :
Supercomputing '94., Proceedings
Conference_Location :
Washington, DC
Print_ISBN :
0-8186-6605-6
DOI :
10.1109/SUPERC.1994.344304
