Beowoof: a Beowulf Cluster with Power Mac 6100s running Yellow Dog Linux
Hardware

Introduction

Motivation

Hardware

Software

Configuration

Installing Linux

Progress

Projects

Notes

Background

Login or Worldly Node “Beowoof” Power Macintosh 6100/66 40MB RAM Asante Nubus ethernet card Quantum 1GB hard drive Apple CD-ROM drive Radius Pivot 824x768 monitor Macintosh keyboard & mouse The additional Ethernet card lets this machine act as a firewall and router for the remaining nodes. The existing Linux kernel did not support the Asante card. Thanks to Takashi Oe, it now does.

Work Nodes “b2, b3, b4, ... b9” Power Macintosh 6100/66 40MB RAM stock 500MB hard drive Eight of these will be configured with a 25MB partition for Mac OS 7.1, a 120MB Swap partition, and a single big root/usr partition. They will share a single Macintosh Monochrome monitor, keyboard, and mouse during setup, and run headless thereafter. A single external CD-ROM drive is used during system software installation. Once that's done, it can stay with Beowoof.

Hub

Linksys 10-port 10BaseT Ethernet hub.

The hub will work but is slower than a switch. I won't use a switch right away... When I've profiled a specific application and found that the system needs a switch, I'll say, "Hmm, this application needs more network throughput." Beowulf clusters are inherently not optimal for parallel tasks that need a lot of intercommunication. 2D cellular automata ("Life") or weather simulations are excellent examples of problems inefficiently solved on a Beowulf. Ray-tracing image rendering or parallel compilation, however, are examples of things that work very well on Beowulfs. Each individual task is fairly independent of all the rest.

Each 6100/66 is capable of 132 bogomips. A 10 Mbps Ethernet connection is generally capable of 3mbps. Since it's a hub, the overall communication rate for the whole system is 3Mbps. The nine computers have between them ~1200 bogomips. Divided by 3Mbps, that's a load of ~400 instructions per transmitted bit.

A 10baseT switch would allow a bandwidth of 3 Mbps spread over 4 pairs of connected machines, or 12 Mbps. That would reduce the load to ~100 instructions per transmitted bit. A 4x improvement in network throughput is not worth it for this particular Beowulf cluster.

Now if the project were to start with 2GHz Pentiums, anything less than 1GbaseT NICs and a 1Gbps switch would be foolish.

X-10 Power Controllers

I am considering controlling the power to the work nodes through two or more X-10 modules. Along with some scripts to manage and monitor the presence of the work nodes, this would provide power savings for when the Beowulf cluster was not being used. At a first-guess, nodes 2, 3, 4 would be on one switch while the remaining nodes 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 would be on the other. The idea would be to develop and debug the program on the main node, then run it on four or nine nodes.