Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Shadowfax is now the newest openMPI Cluster on the block!


That's right, you heard it here first!  My students have finally got the cluster up and running a hello world program.  Thanx go to the whole team who helped install 64-bit Fedora 11 (ArthurD, DevinB, SteveB and JeremyA).  I really like the Gnome version of the Fedora CD we installed.  However, I was surprised to note that GCC is missing.  Its pretty easy to install and update Fedora apps using yum, so we'll have to look into installing GCC.
So, now we have 25 dualcore 64-bit AMD Athlons running at 2GHz per core.  We need to run some benchmarks to see how fast Shadowfax is.  I was looking at LinPack and MTT for this.  Some data sets on there show a 1.2GHz Athlon yeilding 2.4GFlops!  So will one of our 2GHz cores yeild 4GFlops, and a dualcore node 8GFlops?
I'm especially proud of JeremyA for all the time, research and hard work he put in to fleshing out the online howtos (http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=28933 and http://dvbmonkey.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/getting-started-with-open-mpi-on-fedora) as a number of scripts and programs: ftp://centauri.baldwinschools.net/MPI_Cluster
These scripts automate the whole process from installing the openMPI stack, to setting up public key authentication, to compiling and executing a parallel program!  Good Job! 
For more info on openMPI, surf on over to: http://www.open-mpi.org   

Happy Clustering,

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