The CS Department PC Cluster Laboratory

(Last Modified Dec 16, 2003)

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

  • The PC Cluster Laboratory was set up in 1999 with funds provided by the National Science Foundation under Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Grant 9977508 (PI: A Sohn, co-PIs A. Gerbessiotis, D. Karvelas, J. McHugh, Y. Paek) and also by a separate SBR Grant 421350 (PI: A Gerbessiotis). The PC cluster currently consists of 24 Type 1 Workstations, 9 Type 2 workstations, 9 Type 3 workstations, and 16 Type 4 workstations for a total of 58 workstations. There are 2 other Type 2 and 2 Type 3 workstations used for other activities (front-ends, printing etc).
  • Workstation Specification
    1. Type 1 Workstations The Type 1 workstations are monitorless Pentium II 350Mhz dual processor PCs, with 128MB RAM, a 8GB disk, and a 3COM 905B full duplex 100Mbit network card. There are 22 active machines.
    2. Type 2 Workstations The Type 2 workstations are monitorless Pentium II 400Mhz dual processor PCs, with 128MB RAM, a 10GB disk, and a 3COM 905B full duplex 100Mbit network card. There are 9 active machines.
    3. Type 3 Workstations The Type 3 workstations are monitorless Pentium III 500Mhz dual processor PCs, with 128MB RAM, a 10GB disk, and a 3COM 905B full duplex 100Mbit network card. There are 9 active machines.
    4. Type 4 Workstations The Type 4 workstations are monitorless Pentium 4 2.2Ghz uniprocessor PCs, with 512MB RAM, a 30GB disk, and a 100Mbit Broadcom network card. There are 16 active machines.
  • Clustering
    1. Sub-Cluster 1 (16 nodes, 32 CPUS, homogeneous)
      1. Type 1 machines 16 Type 1 PC's form a subcluster connected with a 24-port CISCO Catalyst 2924M-XL-EN switch thus forming a 16-node (32-processor) cluster. All workstations run Red Hat Linux. This is sub-cluster 1. One Type 2 machine is also attached to this cluster and serves as a back-up front-end. For parallel programming LAM-MPI and BSPlib are available.
    2. Sub-Cluster 2 (16-17 nodes, 32-34 CPUS, non-homogeneous)
      1. Type 2 and 3 machines Type 2 and 3 PC's form a subcluster connected with a 24-port CISCO Catalyst 2924M-XL-EN switch. All workstations run Red Hat Linux. This is sub-cluster 2 consisting of 16 nodes (32 processors), and is available to other non Lab-related users. For parallel programming LAM-MPI and BSPlib are available.
    3. Sub-Cluster 3 (6-8 nodes, 12-16 CPUS, homogeneous)
      1. Type 1 machines 6 Type 1 PCs form a subcluster connected with a 24-port CISCO Catalyst 2924M-XL switch. All workstations dual boot Red Hat Linux and Windows 2000. This is sub-cluster 3. For parallel programming LAM-MPI and BSPlib are available under Linux and WMPI (evaluation version) under Windows 2000.
    4. Sub-Cluster 4 (9-16 nodes, 9-16 CPUS, homogeneous)
      1. Type 4 machines 10 Types 4 PCs form a subcluster connected with a 24-port CISCO Catalyst 2924M-XL switch. Some workstations dual boot Red Hat Linux 9.0 and Windows XP, whereas the rest had Red Hat Linux 9.0 installed. For parallel programming LAM-MPI is available.
    5. Other machines Other Type 1,2, 3, 4 machines, and Lab workstations are connected to the 24-port CISCO Catalyst 2924M-XL switch of Sub-Cluster 3 and an 8-port CISCO Catalyst 2908M switch.
  • PC Control Each group of 8 PC's (Type 1, Type 2, or Type 3) is connected to one of a total of 7 Belkin Omniview 8-port PC-controllers. A 17-inch monitor attached to each controller allows the simultaneous control of the attached PC's.
  • Cluster Identification
    1. Type 1,2/Sub-Cluster 1 Internally in the lab Type 1 PCs are referred to as pcc61, pcc62-pcc69, and pcc01-pcc08. Pcc61 (the only Type 2 machine) is the cluster master control with pcc69 serving as the backup.
    2. Type 2/Sub-Cluster 2 Type 2 PCs are referred to as pcc31-pcc38; pcc31 is the front-end.
    3. Type 3/Sub-Cluster 2 Type 3 PCs are referred to as pcc21-pcc28; pcc31 is the front-end.
    4. Type 3/Unclustered These Type 3 PCs are referred to as pcc20,pcc29.
    5. Type 1/Sub-Cluster3 These Type 1 PCs are referred to as pcc11-pcc16.
    6. Type 4/Sub-Cluster4 These Type 4 PCs will be referred to as pcc40-pcc48, pcc51-pcc56.

    A couple of Type 1 PC's have been cannibalized to provide spare parts, and two more are used for other purposes (general work, printing purposes etc). In addition the Lab hosts 4 Ultra-10 Sparc workstations and 1 Ultra-5 Sparc workstation used for other research work.

    InterDepartment and Intradepartment Collaborations

    In the past few months members of the NJIT community have expressed interest in using the PC cluster for research purposes. We have provided access to the PC cluster to the following research groups/individuals.
    1. Prof. J. Leung (CS Department) and his student Haibing Li (CS Department) are using the Type 2 subcluster for running experiments on scheduling algorithms.
    2. Prof. B Cohen (CS Department) who plans to use the Type 2 subcluster initially for research work in computational biolgoy.
    3. Prof G. Whitman (ECE Department) and PhD student M. Y Wu who plan to use the Type 2 subcluster for electrical engineering research work.

    Software Support

    Currently the Type 1 cluster supports parallel programming under MPI (Message Passing Interface) and BSPlib (a library that provides explicit bulk-synchronous parallel model libray support). Some Type 1 machines also make available the PUB Library. MPI support is provided under the default Linux installation of LAM-MPI (version 6.5.1). BSPlib support is provided under BSPlib Version 1.4. BSPlib was developed by J.Hill (now at Sychron Ltd ) at Oxford University Computing Laboratory. ( BSP Worldwide Organization at Oxford University, UK). Paderborn PUB library is also available on subcluster 1.

    Developed Software

    Software developed for the PC cluster is or will become publically available through this link.

    Research Papers

    Links to research papers with an experimental component that utilized the PC cluster will become available through this link.