[Beowulf] Purdue Supercomputer

[Alex Younts]

Joshua mora acosta wrote:
> Does anyone know what is the detailed plan for building that thing with 200
> people in just 1 day?

Yep:

> I am very curious to understand what things can be done in parallel, what
> things are serialized from the point of view of installation, testing and
> evaluation/assesment.

There will be several teams. Multiple 5-6 person teams unboxing nodes 
from their shipping boxes and sorting the materials for recycling. A 
couple cart runners going up and down the elevators into the data 
center. Then, there will be 5-6 3 person teams racking nodes and doing 
the cabling all at once. At the end of the train of people doing the 
hardware, they'll be about 3-4 people coming along and installing the 
nodes. (We use RedHat's kickstart and some special scripts we cooked 
up.) Almost all of this process is parallelized (probably everything 
but the lunch line.)

Once the nodes have a base install, they'll reboot and cfengine will 
run to make them "real" nodes.

> Even monitoring the progress,identifying critical tasks, balancing the
> workforce, having several B,C plans in case plan A fails.

We have a project manager and a lot of staff that have been putting a 
ton of time into this event.

> And what is the final target, to run across the entire cluster HPL by the end
> of the day?

To be running user jobs within 24 hours. We will do the benchmarking 
later after all the DOA hardware has been fixed.

> What is a day in here a business day or 24hours?

The cluster hardware will be done in eight hours, and the software 
will simmer for up to 24 hours.

We have built out a beefy install infrastructure to support a lot of 
simultaneous installs...

> 
> Joshua
> 
> ------ Original Message ------
> Received: Sat, 03 May 2008 10:27:20 AM PDT
> From: John Leidel <john.leidel at gmail.com>
> To: Thomas H Dr Pierce <TPierce at rohmhaas.com>Cc: beowulf at beowulf.org
> Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Purdue Supercomputer
> 
>> >From the looks of their website, all their other clusters run linux.  
>>
>> On Fri, 2008-05-02 at 08:41 -0400, Thomas H Dr Pierce wrote:
>>> Dear Beowulf, 
>>>
>>> Purdue is building their own cluster. to create the 40th largest
>>> supercomputer.  I wonder what operating system they will chose to
>>> use.  
>>>
>>>
> http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/supercomputers/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=EJES2NGMF5LUAQSNDLRSKH0CJUNN2JVN?articleID=207404139&_requestid=84418
> 
>>> And a youtube video on "Installation Day" !
>>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVzThRN4QJI 
>>> ------
>>> Sincerely,
>>>
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> 
> 
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-- 
Alex Younts
alex at younts.org