Assessing the Utility of a Personal Desktop Cluster
2007
The computer workstation, introduced by Sun Microsystems in 1982, was the tool of
choice for scientists and engineers as an interactive computing environment for the development
of scientific codes. However, by the mid-1990s, the performance of workstations
began to lag behind high-end commodity PCs. This, coupled with the disappearance of
BSD-based operating systems in workstations and the emergence of Linux as an opensource
operating system for PCs, arguably led to the demise of the workstation as we
knew it.
Around the same time, computational scientists started to leverage PCs running
Linux to create a commodity-based (Beowulf) cluster that provided dedicated compute
cycles, i.e., supercomputing for the rest of us, as a cost-effective alternative to large
supercomputers, i.e., supercomputing for the few. However, as the cluster movement
has matured, with respect to cluster hardware and open-source software, these clusters
have become much more like their large-scale supercomputing brethren — a shared
datacenter resource that resides in a machine room.
Consequently, the above observations, when coupled with the ever-increasing performance
gap between the PC and cluster supercomputer, provide the motivation for a
personal desktop cluster workstation — a turnkey solution that provides an interactive and parallel computing environment with the approximate form factor of a Sun SPARCstation
1 “pizza box” workstation. In this paper, we present the hardware and software
architecture of such a solution as well as its prowess as a developmental platform for parallel codes. In short, imagine a 12-node personal desktop cluster that achieves 14 Gflops on Linpack but sips only 150-180 watts of power, resulting in a performance-power ratio that is over 300% better than our test SMP platform.
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