GIGAcluster


GIGAcluster, a facility for gigabit Quality of Service Networking.

abstract

The computational physics group of the University of Utrecht, in
collaboration with SURFnet, Cabletron and SUN, is building a computer
cluster to assist in development of telematics applications, which
exploit specific QoS and security options in modern networks. The
proposed cluster will be made available in current and future SURFnet experiments.
The aim of this project is to build up a workstation cluster
capable to perform current and near future QoS and security related
experiments at linespeed up to multiple gigabits.


 

Overview

The Dept. of Computational Physics at Utrecht University, The Netherlands has installed a workstation cluster connected by Gigabit Ethernet. The system is called "Gigacluster" for short. The Gigacluster project is greatly helped by research collaboration projects with SUN and Cabletron. The former company donates Gigabit Ethernet cards within the SUN UltraSparc 10 compute nodes, while the Computational Physics Group evaluates SUN's parallel cluster software. Cabletron makes available a multiple Gigabit routing and switching environment in which Quality of Service network expiriments at  gigabit linespeed can be performed. This system provides direct 1-stage coupling of the compute nodes. In addition, Cabletron puts in 0.4 man for the duration of the network evaluation part of the project.

The following four main activities are planned for the system:

  1. Assessing Gigabit Ethernet behaviour and performance in the Dutch national SURFnet 5 project as defined by SURFnet, the Dutch academic network provider. The cluster will play a crucial part in the modeling of a large number of testing situations. The Gigacluster itself can, by virtue of its configuration, simulate a large amount of situations with respect to behaviour, prioritising of message streams, latency and bandwidth issues that SURFnet likes to be seen answered for its SURFnet 5 project. In addition, the performance of the cluster can be assessed as high-speed parallel communication server as may be useful for SURFnet's purposes.

    2.  
  2. Latch on to the Dutch Wide Area distributed-computing DAS cluster by means of a meta-computing fabric like Globus and Legion) to that are able to harness the capabilities of heterogenous parallel clusters for distributed applications. Within the DAS project (http://www.cs.vu.nl/~bal/das.html) the possibilities of wide-area distributed computing are being investigated. The DAS cluster consists of Intel Pentium Pro 200 MHz nodes (128 at the Vrije Universiteit, and 24 at the Universities of Amsterdam, Delft, and Leiden, respectively). Locally, the Pentium nodes are connected by Myrinet, in the wide-area sense they are connected by ATM. The Computational Physics Group will investigate the consequences of connecting the Gigacluster with the DAS cluster and using it as a heterogenous wide-area cluster by means of one or more metacomputing environments.

    3.  
  3. Use the cluster for research in cluster computing with Gigabit Ethernet as a communication medium. 10 Mb/s and 100 Mb/s Ethernet are both being used routinely in cluster computing. However, the applicability is limited because of the relatively long latency and low bandwidth. A proprietary solution like Myrinet can be chosen to alleviate such problems. Gigabit Ethernet seems a more attractive alternative because of its standard definition that will lead to a large amount of vendors able to offer it for commodity prices in the near future. In addition, with Gigabit Ethernet one is not dependent on a single vendor while a further development in this direction is to be expected.

    4.  
  4. Development of parallel remote control experiments (Esprit project Dynacore, http://www.phys.uu.nl/~dynacore). The part to be done within the Computational Physics Group is mainly focussed on parallel database use by means of CORBA.

    5.  
Activities
-----------

a. prepare network topology plan for the cluster
b. baseline install and connect to UU and SURFnet
c. define and build up management
d. install applications (CORBA, MCU, Objectivity)
e. make overview of available diffserv, intserv and rsvp functionality

Applications
--------------

Status

30-oct-1998: Cluster is ordered, SUN and Cabletron invest heavily in the equipment. Without their contributions this effort would not be possible.

17-dec-1998: SUN cluster is delivered.

08-jan-1999: Two Sun's were connected back to back via GIGAbit ethernet. Basic benchmarking shows that with optimal TCP/IP settings no more traffic than about 340 MBit/s on one SUN station can be generated/accepted. According to SUN engineers one can expect one megabit per megahertz of CPU spees, thus suggesting a CPU bound througput limit. This means that with aggregation the top speed of the 8 station cluster will be around 2.5 GBit/s for the sum of sending and receiving data.

xx-jan-1999: Cabletron is delivering the network pieces. About 50 % is delivered. Building the network will start in the week of 24 Januari 1999.

5-feb-1999: Apart from 3 modules everything has arrived and installed. System configuration is underway. All workstations are now connected to the Gbit/s and 100 Mbit/s switched network.

Activities

Old activities:

"Introduction to Diffserv" by Leon Gommans, presentation to be given on monday 30 november 13h00 in MG301.

Next activity:

14 - 16th April: "Workshop on policy control on QoS enabled networks", on invitation only, MG301.
 

Recent talks:

Equipment

Network equipment
 
L3/L4 SSR
Cabletron
2
SSR8 
8 slot Smartswitch Router, incl Chassis,  Backplane and Modular Fan.
2
SSR-CM-128
Control Module with 128 mb for 125.000
4
SSR-PS-8
Redundant power supply
2
SSR-RS-ENT
Smartswitch Routing services
2
SSR-GSX21-02
2 port 1000BaseSX SCSX MMF 256K flows/mod
2
SSR-HFX21-08
8 port 100Base FX SC MMF 256K flows/mod
2
SSR-HTX22-08
8 port 10/100Base TX Cat5 RJ45 256 fl/mod
     
 
L2 6000 configuration.
  
2
6C105 
Smartswitch 6000 chassis
4
6C205-3
Smartswitch 6000 power supply 
4
6H252-17
16 port 10/100 Ethernet module
2
HSIM-A6DP
High speed OC3 ATM interface
2
APIM-21
OC-3 SC MFF interface
2
HSIM-TM-UGK
Traffic Management upgrade (TM4.0)
2
VHSIM-G6
Gigabit VHSIM
2
GPIM-01
1000Base-SX interface
Computer equipment
8
A22UHC1Z9L-B128CPE WS U10/333FDB2 + 128/9GB
SUN ULTRASPARC 10
8
SOLMS-26EW9999
SOLARIS 2.6 (now 7.0)
8
X1141A
SUN GIGABIT ETHERNET/P 2.0
CdL -  7 feb 1999 Visitors: [an error occurred while processing this directive] Back to home page