Multicomputer Technology Initiative

The Parallel Cluster, Gollach

In order to provide a testbed for MTI activities, the RRSG has bought a parallel cluster. The cluster has been named Gollach, after this old Scottish Poem:

The Horny Gollach
The horny gollach's an awesome beast,
Souple an' scaley;
He has twa horns an' a hantle o' feet
An' a forky tailie.

Anon.

The cluster consists of 8 Pentium II machines, networked with a 100Mbps EtherNet via a CISCO CS2912 12-port switch with 3.2 Gbps backplane. The machines are all dual-bootable with Winows NT4.0 and Redhat Linux 6.0. The Linux kernel has been upgraded to version 2.2.14 and runs MOSIX.
The cluster is currently running Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM), version 3.4.0, XPVM, version 1.2.5 and MPICH (an open source version of MPI - Message Passing Interface).

System specification:

7 Single-CPU Intel Pentium II, 350 MHz machines, 256 MBytes RAM.
1 Dual-CPU Intel Pentium II, 350 MHz machine, 512 MBytes RAM.
CISCO CS2912 12-port Fast EtherNet (100Mbps) switch
MasterView 8-port CPU switch

Photos of Gollach:

As it usually looks;
from the front;
from the front, close-up;
the cpu switch;
from behind.

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