By- Cody Ryan Peeples 12-11-2007
Thanks largely to the efforts of Medhat Mickael, the Center received a donation of 70 computers from Weatherford International Oilfield Services. At the time, we did not know quite what we were getting into. We received a bulky and heavy shipment of computers in May of 2007 at the Burlington Nuclear Engineering Laboratories on NC State University’s Central Campus.
We first went operational with 4 nodes on July 2, 2007. On September 12, 2007 we had 40 nodes operational and a music video as documentary evidence. Not long after that we reached 49 nodes, and we have been running smoothly at that number since.
The Center’s research staff uses the cluster almost exclusively for Monte Carlo simulations. Some within the group [me] have been so impressed with its power as to swear off variance reduction techniques all together. It is an extremely powerful calculator for Monte Carlo. MCNP5 and MCNPX along with a few of the Center’s own Monte Carlo codes (e.g. CEARXRF and CEARCPG) are routinely executed on the cluster. One example of work that has been done on the cluster can be see here.
It is a cluster of somewhat ordinary computers. The individual computers are likely similar to the machine sitting on your desk. They are all linked together through Ethernet devices. The MPICH2 software package, released by Argonne National Laboratory, is used to allow all the computers to pass messages amongst themselves and to work together on the same simulation. When performing Monte Carlo calculations, the result is essentially a fifty(49)-fold increase in performance over a typical single workstation.
All of the computers have their own individual filesystem and operating system, but they are all essentially identical. We chose the Slackware Linux distribution (version 11) for the operating system, because it works and it is free.
Click here to see photos of the
cluster.