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To compute optimal underwater trajectories and Lagrangian Coherent Structures in real-time, the Dynamical Control Systems Laboratory is building a Beowulf cluster. The high-performance parallel computer consists of one main unit and 3 nodes.
The main unit is built around a Pentium D (dual-core) 3.0GHz processor. It uses 8 Go of RAM and maintains a RAID 5 disk array of 1.2 Tb for the rest of the cluster.
The nodes rely on the hardware made available from the main unit and have only a few components inside their case. Appart from their 3.6Ghz Pentium 4 CPU and 4 Go RAM, they only use a small hard disk for their own operating system and a single Gigabyte LAN card.
The Beowulf computers run GNU/Linux. They are networked into a TCP/IP 1Gb/s LAN. A typical simulation on the cluster is launched through the main unit and use a parallel processing library MPI (Message Passing Interface) or PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) to divide a task among the available CPU.
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Construction
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Construction of the main unit (click thumbnails for full-size images)
Construction of the nodes (click thumbnails for full-size images)
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