Adventures in Supercomputing

As part of some extra work in CPSC 550 (Systems Administration), a group of us decided to build a cluster. Our cluster was a network of computers set up to work on the parts of the same problem at the same time (aka in parallel). The goal was to try out various clustering packages on a variety of architectures, and configurations (PCs running linux and BSD, and some Sparc 2 workstations). Time did not permit us to go further than a hetrogenous network of PCs running NetBSD.

Configuration

The initial cluster was modest. While we have 8 PC's, only 4 are fully set up, and connected. The network looks a little like this:

Most the machines have neither keyboard, nor monitor, nor mouse. Everything is done over the network. The network is composed of various PC's, all brought in by group members. The current setup is as follows:

grampa (172.16.1.1) A P75 (in a 386 case) with 16 megs of RAM
bigmac (172.16.1.2) Another P75 with 16 megs of RAM
mojo (172.16.1.4) A P133 with 32 megs of RAM. Also the NFS server
krusty (172.16.1.5) A P200 with 128 megs of ram. The master machine

Network connectivity came from a generic 10MBit hub. Ideally, a 100Mbit switch would have been nicer, but you take what you can get.

Initially, NetBSD 1.4.2 was installed, along with PVM 3.4.3. The included examples ran, which was encouraging. From this point, the remiaining 4 machines were brought online. See the final report for details on the final configuration.
In a nutshell, we took the stock OS, installed pvm, and some custom scripts to push a master password file around so logins worked to/from any host.