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).

	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.
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!
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.

Back to Clusters