2 tera flops Debian Cluster

Hi lwn

Here is a little story from Denmark. Not as big as the 9.2 tera flops
http://lwn.net/Articles/4759/ but is nearly up and running.

best regards/hans
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2 tera flops Debian Cluster


(Original article by Kurt Westh Nielsen www.ing.dk, english resume by Hans
Schou)

Students at "Syddansk Universitet" in Denmark are about to finish a 512
node Debian GNU/Linux cluster.

Professor Brian Vinter from Syddansk Universitet is in charge of building
the most powerfull computer in Denmark together with students. The
computer is expected to perform 2 tera FLOPS which will rank it at the top
end at www.top500.org .

Researchers in Denmark has for a long time needed more computer power. 200
research groups has already signed up for usage of the computer.  One of
the projects is about a map down of the pigs genome.

The installation is build up by 512 standard PC computers from HP equiped
with Intel Pentium 4 at 2 GHz and 1G RAM for the price of USD 874,000 (EUR
861,000 - DKK 6.4 mill). The network is 100 Mbit.

25 year old Henning Martinussen used December month to find out which CPU
they should use. One of the reason for choosing Intel Pentium 4 was the
thermal throttling function. If there is a cooling failure in the room it
will only result in lower performance, not melt down of the CPU core. The
room temperature will be 85 F° (30 C°) under normal conditions.

The operating system is Debian GNU/Linux with PBSpro and MAUI for batch
scheduling. Compilers will be GCC and others.

Technical description of the project:
http://www.dcsc.sdu.dk/index.php?id=1

Henning Martinussen CPU research:
http://www.imada.sdu.dk/~hma/intel/

Article in danish
http://www.ing.dk/apps/pbcs.dll/article?Avis=IG&Dato=20020719&Kategori=IT&Lopenr=207180002&Ref=AR