Automatic Power Control

One key design component of the new Limulus Case is software controlled power to the nodes. This feature will allow nodes to be powered-on only when needed. As an experiment, a simpel script was written that monitors the Grid Engine queue. If there are jobs waiting in the queue, nodes are powered-on. Once the work is done (i.e. nothing more in the queue) the nodes are powered off).

As an example, an 8 core job was run on the Norbert cluster (in the Limulus case). The head node has 4 cores and each worker node has 2 cores for a total of 10 cores. An 8 node job was submitted via Grid Engine with only the head node powered-on. The script noticed the job waiting in the queue and turned on a single worker node to give 6 cores total, which were still not enough. Another node was powered-on and the total cores reached 8 and the job started to run. After completeion, the script noticed that there was nothing in the queue and shutdown the nodes.

Update January 2011

The following is a list of basic cluster RPMS that will be included in the software stack. The base distribution will be Scientific Linux.

•  Scientific Linux V5.4
•  Perceus Cluster Toolkit - Cluster administration
•  PDSH - Parallel Distributed Shell for collective administration
•  Sun Grid Engine - Resource Scheduler
•  Torque - Alternative/Optional? Resource Scheduler (previously Open PBS)
•  Ganglia - Cluster Monitoring System
•  GNU Compilers (gcc, g++, g77, gdb) - Standard GNU compiler suite
•  Modules - Manages User Environments
•  PVM - Parallel Virtual Machine (message passing middleware)
•  MPICH2 - MPI Library (message passing middleware)
•  OPEN-MPI - MPI Library (message passing middleware)
•  ATLAS - host tuned BLAS library
•  FFTW - Optimized FFT (2-MPI,3) library
•  FFTPACK - FFT library
•  LAPACK and BLAS - Linear Algebra library
•  GNU GSL - GNU Scientific Library (over 1000 functions)
•  Userstat - a "top" like job queue/node monitoring application
•  Beowulf Performance Suite - benchmark and testing suite