LISHA's SNOW Cluster Fully Functional

A new SNOW cluster has been installed at LISHA. The building of the cluster was sponsored by CNPq within the context of a project that aims at implementing a parallel infrastructure for DNA sequencing.

The basic SNOW cluster architecture is defined around a set of Intel ix86 PCs interconnect by MYRINET and ETHERNET networks as shown in the figure bellow.

SNOW Architecture

SNOW basic architecture.

The cluster installed at LISHA consists of a server plus eight work nodes, each a dual Athlon MP 1.9 on a TYAN TIGER MPX motherboard with 1 GBytes of DDR-RAM and a 64 bit/66 MHz PCI bus. Each node also contains a MYRINET 2000 and an ETHERNET NIC respectively for the computing and service networks.

Regarding the software, LISHA's SNOW cluster currently runs EPOS and LINUX (RedHat 7.3 with kernel 2.4.18). When running on EPOS, applications rely on a distributed objects API, while MPI (MPICH 1.2.4) is the API when running LINUX.