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Results of the One-Year Cluster Pilot Project

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High Performance Computing and Networking (HPCN-Europe 2000)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1823))

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Abstract

During recent years clustered systems using off-the-shelf processors and standard Ethernet networks have been increasingly popular. The motivation has been primarily the cheap price of systems, but also the rapid development of standard processors. So-called Beowulf systems have spread around the world. This development is further accelerated by the LINUX-boom which provides an ideal and free operating system for these clusters.

In the end of 1998 a pilot project was started at CSC in order to study PC clusters for parallel computing. The aim was to gather experience about performance, bottlenecks and quality of programming tools. We will present in this paper our experiences in building a 32-processor PC cluster and running parallel applications on it.

The initial problems in getting the systems to work properly and tuned represented a fair workload. Data communication bottlenecks turned out to be a major performance issue. A small number of parallel scientific applications, mostly running on Cray T3E or other parallel systems, was transferred to the PC cluster environment in order to get porting experience. A large set of benchmarks was run on the cluster, in addition to the benchmarking of the ported applications.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. CSC - Scientific Computing Ltd., P.O.Box 405, FIN-02101, Espoo, Finland

    Kimmo Koski, Jussi Heikonen, Hannes Niemi, Juha Ruokolainen, Pekka Tolvanen, Jussi Mäki & Jussi Rahola

Authors
  1. Kimmo Koski
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  2. Jussi Heikonen
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  3. 1Jari Miettinen
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  4. Hannes Niemi
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  5. Juha Ruokolainen
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  6. Pekka Tolvanen
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  7. Jussi Mäki
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  8. Jussi Rahola
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Computer Science and Academic Computer Center CYFRONET, University of Mining and Metallurgy (AGH), al. Mickiewicza 30, 30-059, Cracow, Poland

    Marian Bubak

  2. Faculteit der Natuurwetenschappen, Wiskunde en Informatica, Universiteit van Amsterdam, 1098 SJ, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Hamideh Afsarmanesh  & Bob Hertzberger  & 

  3. California Institute of Technology, Caltech 158-79, Pasadena, CA, 91125, USA

    Roy Williams

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© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Koski, K. et al. (2000). Results of the One-Year Cluster Pilot Project. In: Bubak, M., Afsarmanesh, H., Hertzberger, B., Williams, R. (eds) High Performance Computing and Networking. HPCN-Europe 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1823. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45492-6_85

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45492-6_85

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-67553-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45492-2

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