by T. Pirim

The Linux Beowulf Cluster, known as Mimosa, has been put back into production as of 14:00 pm Tuesday, February, 3 2004, after 2 weeks of down time for the purpose of hardware upgrades and benchmark tests. We have upgraded the network connection between the nodes from 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps connection.

The upgrade was performed in two sessions, each of which was completed in a week. During the first session, Intel brand gigabit network cards were installed to each node, including the 6 Input/Output nodes. While some nodes were having their network cards installed, we performed the Nasa Parallel Benchmarks and High Performance Linpack Benchmarks on the free 2800 MHz/1024 MB RAM nodes.

After the installation of the network cards and the performance runs on 100 Mbps network, the second session was started by replacing the 10/100 Mbps switches with 1000 Mbps. Specifically, we installed 5 Nortel BayStack Model 5510-48T Stackable Switches, each w/ 48 10/100/1000BaseT ports, 2 built-in fiber mini-GBIC slots, and built-in stacking ports. After the switch installation, the same benchmark tests as in the first session were performed again to obtain a reliable comparison of the different network systems. Furthermore, a 134-node High Performance Linpack benchmark was also performed to see the full capacity results of the 2800 MHz nodes. The preliminary analyses indicate a significant increase in the performance of the cluster, which will gratify the valuable members of MCSR. The analysis and results will be presented in the upcoming MAS conference by Tyler Simon.