Beowulf Hardware

Index

• Clusters at the Goddard Space Flight Center
• Links to Processor and Motherboard information

Goddard Clusters

There are current two large Beowulf clusters at GSFC, along with numerous smaller clusters.

The Hive

Read about the Hive on it's own page.

Data Server Cluster

The Bulk Data Server cluster is a 50 node cluster built in May and June 1997. It is a non-homogeneous consisting of 10 "router" nodes and 40 "data" nodes.

Each router node consists of:

• Tyan S1668 Dual Pentium Pro 440FX Motherboard (w/ five PCI slots)
• Two Pentium Pro CPU's running at 166 MHz
• 128M of memory
• Packet Engines "Yellowfin" Gigabit Ethernet adapter.
• Myricom Myrinet adapter (four nodes only).
• Adaptec Cogent Quartet Quad-Tulip PCI ethernet adapter.
• 4 6.4GB Seagate IDE disks (on two channels)

Each data node consists of:

• Intel "Providence" PR440FX Motherboard with on-board Intel Fast Ethernet.
• One or two Pentium Pro CPU's running at 200 MHz
• 32M or 128M of memory (planned as 128M for all nodes).
• One to four 6.4GB Seagate IDE disks (with scheduled upgrades to four 6.4GB or 7.0GB disks on all nodes)

Here are some pictures of the cluster: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Prices

In the mass-market all price lists are obsolete by the time you finish reading them, but here are the part prices of a few of the cluster components as of October 1997:

Intel PR440FX motherboard        $385
P6-180Mhz processor		 $213
128M ECC 3.3V DIMM	         $655
6.4GB Segate 3.5" disk           $305
In-Win A500 ATX case             $ 95

The Hive

The Hive cluster is a 64 node dual-processor cluster built in August 1997 for image processing computation. Details are available on the Hive web page.

Older clusters

Older GSFC Beowulf clusters are a 16 processor Pentium-based cluster "Hrothgar", a five process Pentium-baand cluster with multiple signal processing boards, and our original 486-based cluster "Wiglaf".

Hrothgar

• A Pentium processor running at 100Mhz
• A PCI motherboard based on the Intel Triton chipset
• 256K of synchronous cache
• 32M of memory
• 1.2G EIDE disk attached to the motherboard's 17MB/sec. bus master IDE controller.
• Two/three 100Mbs Fast Ethernet adapters.

Wiglaf

The original Beowulf prototype is still in use for system software development and testing. Each node consists of

• One DX4 processor running at 100Mhz internally.
• A motherboard
• 16M of memory
• 540M or 1G EIDE disk communicating at 8.3MB/sec to a VLB interface
• Three 10Mbs bus-master ethernet cards, usually running channel bonded, but occasionally through an NBase ethernet switch.

Links to Processor and Motherboard information

Dual Pentium II motherboards

• Intel DK440LX motherboard
• ASUS P2L97-DS
• Supermicro P6DLH