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AlphaNode
Beowulf System based on Alpha Data's AlphaNode hardware
(No longer recommended for new designs)
Introduction
BEAM have been developing software for and producing parallel computing
systems based on Unix for ten years. Most of our work has been with embedded
processors installed within PC based Unix Workstations. Now with the advent
of the Open Source Linux operating system, fast 100Mbit network switches,
low CPU utilisation Ethernet chip-sets and low cost fast processors the
way has been opened to produce very flexible, extensible and low cost
parallel computing platforms.
AlphaNode Hardware
The Alphanode hardware consists of 2U high 19 inch rack mounting case housing
4 DEC Alpha processors. Each processor has a local cache accessing 128
Mbytes or more of PC100 SDRAM RAM and two full duplex 100Mbit Ethernet
interfaces. Local RAM is easily up-gradable. The Alphanode boots and runs
from a host using standard BOOTP, TFTP and NFS protocols. This host can
be a Linux Alpha or Intel based system or indeed any system that supports
these standard Internet protocols. The nodes and host are interconnected
by 100Mbit fast Ethernet connections, normally through fast Ethernet switch
units. The Ethernet switch provides full bi-directional wire speed networking
performance between all nodes giving a node bandwidth of 200Mbits/s per
Ethernet interface. Normally the host is connected via a separate Ethernet
gateway to the sites local area network. As well as using Ethernet switches
point-to-point networks can be optionally used using the two Ethernet interfaces.
Each Alphanode processor can have a PMC interface card added. These
PMC's include I/O, Alpha processing boards and FPGA boards. The system
is inherently multi-user and can be used from the console or from any computer
on the local area network. The system is expandable, more nodes can be
added as required.
4 * 21164 Alpha Processor @ 667MHz
10.0 BIPS and 5.0 GFLOPS
SDRAM DIMM up to 1G per node 2MB level 3 cache
8 * 100 Base TX Fast Ethernet - 2 per processor
400MHz Ethernet bandwidth per node
4 PMC IO Expansion slots providing support for FPGA compute engines, Networking,
Frame Grabbers, Display Boards or other proprietary PMC cards
Slimline 19" 2U rack mounted unit
BOOTP/TFTP/NFS support - nodes boot/run from Linux or other host.
Linux ISP Providers
Linux Clusters
Beowulf Systems
Real-time systems
 AlphaNode
data sheet
AlphaNode Software
The software for the system is based upon the stable and becoming increasingly
popular, Open Source, Linux operating system. The host and each node
runs an optimised Linux kernel and has access to the full system
resources. The system includes compilers for 'C', 'C++', Objective C, Fortran,
Java, Pascal, Perl, tk etc. The Alpha Node processors run a Linux kernel
that communicates with a host for all I/O.
Software for parallel processing comes from the world wide development
community and is based upon the work of the Beowulf Project at CEDIS. Software
includes PVM and MPI. Also conventional Unix process communication and
inter networking is available such as SYSV IPC, pthreads and TCP/IP networking.
All of the systems software is available in source code form. In addition
to the standard Linux and parallel processing software comes BEAMS parallel
processing tool kit and a host of development goodies
Standard Linux and parallel processing software
Based upon Open Source Linux Operating System
BEAM's Parallel processing tool kit
GUI based symbolic debugger
GUI source code editor
Simple installation and maintenance of Alphanodes from host system.
Management of nodes from host system including boot up messages and control
to reboot and power off.
Performance monitoring application for CPU's, RAM and communications in
the system.
Communications Performance
The performance of the inter node communications is very important in getting
real parallel computer performance from applications. BEAM Beowulf systems
are based upon a switched 100Mbit Ethernet network. The Ethernet interfaces
on each node operate in full duplex 100Mbit/s mode providing a maximum
bi-directional data rate of 200Mbits/s. The Ethernet switches employed
offer full wire performance between all nodes simultaneously up to quite
a large number of nodes.
Processing Performance
Each Alpha Unit has four Alpha 21164 667 MHz processors each of these has
the following performance figures:
| Item |
Performance |
| Specfp95 |
32.4 |
Internet resources
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