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4/22/2002: The lunchbox gets a makeover!
Bento, aka the lunchbox cluster, is our newest LinuxBIOS/BProc cluster.
Okay, so it's really in a toolbox, so think of it as a lunchbox for the really
hungry. Thanks to Rob Armstrong and Mitch Williams of the Embedded
Reasoning Institute at Sandia - Livermore for turning us on to this hardware.
They're way ahead of us in terms of picking out good, small iron since
they're sending their's up in the nose cone of a missle.
- Front-end: IBM Thinkpad T23 (Ron's laptop) running BProc
from the Clustermatic W2002 release
- 7 smartCoreP5
nodes from Digital Logic running
LinuxBIOS configured with BProc support
- 1 (one) naked 3Com 100 Mb HUB (removed from it's case)
- 3 IBM Thinkpad 12 V power bricks
- 1 (one) Master Mechanic yellow plastic toolbox
This is a nice little demo unit to take around the country. It's been through
a lot already -- Ron's was randomly selected to have his all his bag
searched ("uh, what's that?" said security), and now he's blacklisted forever.
But more importantly, it's been great way for us to get real, kernel-level
development work done while traveling. For example, in Houston Matt was able
to work on Supermon when (not) in meetings.
Ron integrated Lm_sensors into Supermon
in California. You just can't do that unless you have a cluster that can be
easily rebooted (i.e., on-site).
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Bento in its full
glory. Notice the two airflow holes drilled on the side. The nodes are
in the bottom and the naked hub is mounted to the lid. Ignore mess on
Ron's desk. |
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The larger boards on each end are the power supplies. There
are three boards on one and four on the other. Power definitely needs
a redesign. You hear the fans slow down when running a real (floating-point
intensive) application. Oops!
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We took the Hub
out of the case, so it would fit into the lunchbox. We started with a
little Netgear switch, but that got way too hot. Interestingly enough,
we found that 6-ish nodes actually come up faster through a hub than a
switch. |
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