Andrew Fecheyr-Lippens!
CAC Actividad 2
Andrew Fecheyr Lippens CAC: Actividad 2 15 October 2009
C L U S T E R C O N F I G U R AT I O N S A cluster should be configured depending on the applications required to run on it. The type of cluster (high productivity, performance or availability) will define the specific needs of the cluster: storage, memory, level of redundancy, interconnection latency and bandwidth. As a goal for the Budget Cluster we aim to build a teraflop cluster with acceptable availability using as little money as possible. The goal for the High Performance Cluster is to configure a machine able to enter the TOP500 list (based on the June 2009 ranking). We describe the Budget Cluster with more detail and discuss the different configuration choices. For the High Performance Cluster we include a brief description of the components.
Budget Cluster For the budget cluster we choose inexpensive commodity computing nodes without any form of hardware redundancy. High availability requirements should come from the amount of computing nodes and the software’s ability to redirect workload from a failed node to online nodes. Another possibility is to have one or two of the computing nodes as hot or cold spare’s. We do however configure the master and storage node with significant hardware redundancy, as failure of this node will bring down the whole cluster. Master Node For cost efficiency the master node will also provide the central storage for the cluster. A 2U rackserver with 8 hot swappable 3,5� slots was chosen. Because any downtime of the master node will result in downtime of the complete cluster, this node has a high level of hardware redundancy. Supermicro provides a redundant power supply, registered ECC memory and a IPMI server management module with KVM-over-IP on a dedicated LAN port. The server also has a 3 year warranty with OnSite replacement within 4 hours of failure, ensuring that any downtime will be quickly resolved. As for the storage component, a 8xSATA/SAS hardware raid solution by Areca was chosen. The 8 Western Digital 1TB drives can be used in RAID-6 or in RAID-5 with a hot spare bringing the total storage capacity to about 6TB with enough redundancy to cover two hard drive failures.
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