official site of the
Westmont Cluster Project
coordinated and administered by:
Wayne Iba
active project participants:
Ben Fisk
... Your Name Here? ...
(updated 9/9/2008)
Latest Updates
9/9/2008:
The cluster's age is starting to show. This summer, we had periodic
problems with compute nodes refusing to reboot. A few day ago, one node
completely died. Also, our brand new switch has developed a bad port.
7/2/2008: After replacing the gigabit switch, I clocked 83.75 GFLOPS on the HPLinpack.
4/2008-6/2008: With several students from my machine learning
class, we implemented and tested a genetic algorithm using the island
model. The algorithm was tested on the chess endgame domain from
the UCI machine learning repository. Our paper appears in the
Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Methods.
6/25/2007: Have been running MĘDEN simulation experiments on the cluster for our service research.
We are currently analyzing 460K trials that we have completed.
(We've probably run three-times that but had to throw the results
out for various reasons.)
7/2006: Benchmarking the cluster using the HPLinpack, we clocked 74.1 GFLOPs.
5/2006: The school installed a dedicated air-conditioner for the
cluster. A ceiling fan works much of the time when it is nice
outside and we use the air-conditioner when it gets too hot.
8/31/2005:
Much has been happening even though this hasn't been updated.
Thomas Cantrell's code progressed to the point where we were able to
cover the search space of the ClimbPro12 puzzle. Various hurdles
prevented a solution to ClimbPro24.
1/4/2005:
Over three months now and we are still waiting on the last two compute
nodes.
12/8/2004: Ten
weeks and counting. The disks for the server apparently
arrived. We're just waiting on two missing shuttles. I've
had all but eight of the nodes off the last few days as the heat was
getting quite high. We're still working with facilities folks
here to get a fan to vent the heat from the cluster. Thomas
Cantrel is making progress on an implementation of a parallel
depth-first search.
12/3/2004: After nine weeks we have 30 out of 32 compute nodes and
today we received the gigabit switch. I must admit that some of
my faith in corporate service -- at least for CDW -- has been
restored. There is no avoiding the fact that this has been a
nightmare, but the representative of CDW seems to have gone the extra
mile and I anticipate being satisfied at the end of the ordeal. I
have mildly ammended my comments from 11/20/04; they were written at
the peak of my frustration.
[prior updates]
Vision
Clusters of generic PC workstations tightly linked to provide
intensive computational capabilities have been gaining
popularity. These clusters, sometimes known as Beowulf Clusters,
have the obvious advantage of consisting of inexpensive components
while delivering massive computations relatively quickly.
We view the Westmont Cluster Project as a service opportunity that
has three primary benefits. First, the people working on the
project gain the experience of constructing, configuring, and
administering a cluster system. While we do not expect that most
participants will be pursuing parallel architectures in graduate school
nor working with super-computers in the commercial sector, we believe
the experience with a cluster system will provide valuable skills that will be important either in
graduate school or in industry. Second, the resulting Westmont
Cluster will be able to support the computational needs of several
client users. We already have plans to utilize the cluster's
capabilities on data mining and machine learning research starting late
in the Spring of 2004, but other possible clients include researchers
conducting numerical simulation or finite-element analysis. And
third, the resulting platform will allow the participants to study and
develop existing and novel parallel algorithms.
Useful Links
...
Rocks Cluster Distribution
Beowulf.org
Supercluster.org
A Beowulf
mailing list FAQ
A cluster
mini-HOWTO
Open Cluster Group
Remote Network Boot via
PXE
...
Acknowledgements
We are deeply grateful to the Ahmanson Foundation for a generous
grant
to Westmont College that is funding a new cluster composed of current
(as of late 2004) components. We thank Westmont's Provost,
Shirley Mullen, for additional funds to provide electricity and
ventilation needed to run the cluster. We also acknowledge the
support of the Westmont IT
department. This project would have been impossible without the
generous contributions -- both physically and technically -- of their
office and staff. Special thanks go to Barry Cunningham, Fed
Gallardo, Kevin Grose, Kevin Hess, John Rodkey, Jonathan Sullivan, and
Jesse Thurman.
I also want to express my appreciation to past participants in the
project who have contributed in one form or another:
Dustin
Carrol, Thomas Cantrell, Josh Holm, Chip Howell, Kirsten Iba, Erik Rodkey, John Rodkey.