We finished installing the Cluster at the Department of Atomic and Molecular Physics at the Faculty of Exact Sciences, UNNE. In the picture, you can see the beast almost finished—just the rack covers are missing.
The cluster is composed of 6 Sun Fire x2200 servers, each with two dual-core Opteron 64 processors and 4 GB of RAM—truly atomic machines.
The base operating system installed was OpenSUSE 10.2, as requested by the faculty’s IT staff, otherwise we would have installed Gentoo :P. It’s worth noting that none of these machines come with a CD drive, so we had to remaster the installation CD image to boot from a USB drive.
On top of the OS, we installed an MPI cluster with LAM-MPI, and also added a system to manage batch processes (PBS). In our case, we chose Torque. Finally, we tested it with an application used in the department called DIRAC.
It was amazing when we found that processes that took 8 hours on a PC only took 35 minutes on the cluster—apparently everything worked well.
