ENVS 1200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Los Alamos National Laboratory, Backplane, Hard Disk Drive
13 May 2018
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ENVS 1200 Lecture 15 Notes – PCs Scavenged
Introduction
• In many cases the COTS components are older PCs scavenged from the scrap pile, and
connected together to do some useful work.
• Blade components are computers mounted on a board that can be plugged into
connectors on a rack, in much the same way peripheral cards are plugged into a PC
motherboard.
• The backplane of the rack provides power and the dedicated Ethernet connection to
each blade.
• The blades themselves are built from standard off-the-shelf parts.
• Photographs of a blade and the rack that together comprise the components of a
Beowulf cluster in use at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
• Each blade contains a Crusoe processor, 256MB of memory, a 10 GB hard disk, and
three 100-MB/sec Ethernet interfaces.
• The network connection between the nodes is not accessible from outside the cluster,
which eliminates security concerns other than the authentication required to maintain
cluster integrity.
• Instead, a Beowulf cluster generally has a single front-end gateway server that manages
the nodes in the cluster and provides connectivity to the outside world.
• It also provides a monitor and keyboard to be shared among all of the nodes in the
cluster.
• Each node is configured with its own hardware, its own operating system, and its own
Beowulf clustering software.
• In a COTS system, it is common to see a variety of hardware from different vendors in
use at different nodes, but blade systems tend to be more uniform.
• Linux is generally the operating system of choice because of its flexibility.
• In addition to its own configurability, Linux provides the tools needed to configure the
cluster to include all the features of a powerful distributed system.
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