Vangard
Vangard was built by Dr. Tim Young
of the
UND Physics Department
, for the purpose of running his computational
model of stellar atmospheres.
The cluster consisted of 8 nodes, each containing a 1 GHz AMD Athlon
CPU. The nodes were interconnected via 100 megabit ethernet using a
3Com switch. The master node contained two network interfaces,
the user filesystem, keyboard, mouse, and monitor. The compute
nodes ran headless (no keyboard, mouse, monitor), while the master
node ran X windows. This is the "classic" Beowulf configuration.
My involvement with the project came when Dr. Young had some problems
configuring the network filesystem mount points to allow MPI
to run. The compute nodes and the master node user filespaces have
to look identical for this to work. I also helped him generate
ssh keypairs to allow proper remote execution on the compute nodes.
These configuration issues are relatively minor but can be show-stoppers
for people with no experience building clusters.
Young also learned another bit of important cluster information when
he situated it in his office: clusters tend to make lots of noise
and heat, and consume a lot of power. He soon assembled a larger
system in a machine room.