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

fYear

1994

fDate

14-18 Nov 1994

Firstpage

410

Lastpage

419

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;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Supercomputing '94., Proceedings

Conference_Location

Washington, DC

Print_ISBN

0-8186-6605-6

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/SUPERC.1994.344304

Filename

344304