CHEETAH Beowulf
 

Eighteen nodes done

We are in the process of building a 200+ core Beowulf cluster using using Chemical Engineering and CIEMACS (Colorado Institute for Energy, Materials and Computational Science) funding.  CHEETAH stands for CHEmical Engineering Teraflop Alderson Hall.  The theoretical performance of this new machine will be ~1.1 TF.  We will also be adding "recycled" Athlon 1800 parts Beowulf from one of our computing labs which will provide another 0.15 TF.  Thus, our theoretical compute power will be a little over 1 TF.  We certainly won't be on the top 500 list but we will be crunching some numbers. Using Condor we will also be able to tap into another 100 cores in our primary computing lab, moving us close to 1.5 TF.

The new machine will have 50+ 2U rackmounts contained in three 42U racks.  Each rack will has its own set of  interconnected gigabit switches along with KVMs.  The basic configuration of each of the computers is as follows:

  • Tyan 2927 Motherboard
  • Two Opteron 2214 HE dual core processors
  • 4G PC5400 RAM
  • 80 GB 7200 rpm Western Digital Hard Drive
  • Broadcom Gigbit NICs

In addition there is a control machine that contains 200 GB of disk space, dual NICs and otherwise identical hardware (its in a 3U case).  There is also a 14 TB fiber channel SAN in the system.

People working on this project are:

  • Jim Ely
  • Steve Toleque
  • Dawn Culley

We'll keep you posted!

Who's the man?  Steve

Abigail at work

She has a front side too!.