Minigang (with its own FastEthernet switch and no monitor for the nodes) next to what would later become its big brother, chaingang - This picture is really bad...
Minigang (with its own FastEthernet switch and no monitor for the nodes) next to what would later become its big brother, chaingang - This picture is really bad...
Introduction
Minigang is a test Beowulf cluster that we built to investigate the feasibility of building a larger Beowulf. The whole project was kind of haphazardously done, but in a couple of weeks and after scavenging around for hardaware, we had the cluster made and tested, and had already decided that a larger version was the way to go.
Minigang was 'finished' in September of 1999, and it is still operational, although for the past 3 months it has been sitting there iddling. I still plan to use for some of our less demanding chemical shift calculations...
Hardware
The hardware used for minigang was all in the surplus deposit of out IT department. It consists of 5 machines:
Server: Gateway 2000 - P-75, 16
MB RAM, 800 MB HDD, 10 MB NE-2000 NIC (2) - Total cost: $0.00
Nodes (4): Dell - P-75, 8 MB RAM,
560 MB HDD, 10 MB NE-2000 NIC - Total cost: $0.00
Switch: Linksys 8-port 100/10 MB
Fast Ethernet switch - Total cost: $120
We also have a set of monitor/mouse/keyboard that we found lying around somewere. Next week (4/4/2000) we will 'upgrade' the scratch space in minigang to a local 13 GB IDE hard drive. Right now it scratches to an NFS mounted hard drive...
Software
Minigang runs Linux (RedHat 6.0) on all nodes, and does most of its communications with MPI and Linda.
The only two packages installed in minigang are GAMESS (versions 98 and 99), as well as Gaussian98, revision a.7. We do not expect to install a lot more software in this cluster, except when we decide to re-write some of our code in parallel...
Some old pictures
Here are some old pictures of minigang. This was before we had installed a dedicated FastEthernet switch to connect the nodes. Also, the 'spatial configuration' was different (i.e., we had lots of space and we could spread around...). In some of the pictures you can see one of our SGI O2 workstations, against which minigang clocked very nicely...
I don't think there will be any other picture here. This is the minigang page, and I'm not changing it...