Sponsored By
Efika 5200B Project
Inexpensive Supercomputer Research Platformin category Applications & Software
proposed by digitaldisaster on 11th February 2006 (accepted on 20th March 2006)
Project Summary
The low cost, small size and low power consumption of the EFIKA board makes it ideal for open source developers to use for research into improvements to and replacements for cluster software such as the MPI [1] and PVM [2] IPC libraries and cluster thread/process control software such as Mosix [3] as well as distributed filesystems such as AFS [4], PVFS [5] and GFS [6] and network interconnect topology such as Flat Neighbourhood Network [7][8] or Hypercube.A complete HPC distribution tailored to the EFIKA hardware and compiled with optimization flags appropriate for the MPC5200 could be produced to fit in a very small memory footprint. Such a distribution would include only the drivers, tools and libraries necessary for using the EFIKA in a HPC cluster environment. Any machine with the appropriate software installed (for example an Open Desktop Workstation to keep an end to vendor and architecture) could be used to network boot the EFIKA\'s from a single image of the distribution allowing for easy management of multiple nodes. A set of tools could be created to allow both generic system management as well as HPC specific management such as creating processes and threads and migrating these threads between nodes as well as viewing statistics to monitor the usage and health of each cluster node.
[1] http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/
[2] http://www.csm.ornl.gov/pvm/
[3] http://www.mosix.org/
[4] http://www.openafs.org/
[5] http://www.pvfs.org/
[6] http://www.redhat.com/software/rha/gfs/
[7] http://aggregate.org/FNN/
[8] http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/klat2.ars/1
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