CSG Computing Cluster

The CSG Cluster resides in the MACC, a new data center in the Michigan Information Technology Center building. This facility provides groups at the University of Michigan with 8,500 square feet for hosting a mix of computing platforms. The data center, located on State Street near the Howard Cooper Honda dealer, provides us with plenty of space, cooling, uninterruptable and clean power and security for our growing cluster. Here are lots of pictures of the MACC data center (thanks to Andrew Caird).

A much smaller cluster, remains in SPH II. It is for testing and early versions of MOSIX and Linux.

Physical Description

The CSG cluster is located in row 15, east side of the MACC data center. The MACC provides up to 50A (6000W) of power per rack - only about half of what a fully loaded rack could use. Thus, for the client machines (all 1Us) only about half of the rack is populated, the rest is filled with filler panels for better air flow control. The rack where our gateways reside is much fuller, as it contains a substantial amount of storage (RAID units).

Rack Descriptions

15E-H contains the oldest client machines, currently

• 9 x Dell PowerEdge 1850 units, dual 3GHz processors, 4GB memory. Each has a very small SCSI disk drive.
  
  
• 15 x Dell PowerEdge 1425SC units, dual 3GHz processors, 2GB memory. Each has a very small SATA disk drive.
  
  
• Client nodes available: 48 processors, 66GB memory
  
  

15E-G contains the newer client machines, currently

• 17 x Dell PowerEdge 1950 units, varying speed quad core processors, 8GB memory. Each has a very small SATA disk drive.
  
  
• Client nodes available: 136 processors, 136GB memory
  
  

15E-F contains the gateway and auxillary server machines, currently

• fantasia, a Dell PowerEdge 2950 server, E5345 quad core processors, 16GB memory. This has 6 internal disks in a RAID providing 2.6TB of disk space. In addition fantasia has an external Dell MD3000 RAID which provides an addition 10TB of disk space.
  
  
• snowwhite, a Dell PowerEdge 1950 server, E5345 quad core processors, 8GB memory. This has an external JetStor III RAID attached which provides an 3.5TB of disk space.
  
  
• aladdin, a Sun X2100 server, dual core AMD Athon processors, 2GB memory and 400GB of disk space. This machine provides a small MySQL database server to the cluster machines, as well as DHCP services.
  
  
• pinocchio, a Dell PowerEdge 1850 server, dual core 3.0GHz processors, 4GB memory. This machine provides backup space for all cluster gateways and has 4.9TB of disk space available on several RAID units.
  
  
• Server totals: 16 processors, 246GB memory, approximately 16TB of user space.
  
  

SPH rack (not in MACC, but rather in SPH-II) contains the newer client machines, currently

• peterpan, a Dell PowerEdge 6600 server, four 2.8GHz processors, 16GB memory. This has 6 internal disks in a RAID providing 0.5TB of disk space. In addition peterpan has an external RAID which provides an addition 1.1TB of disk space.
  
  
• BladeCenter, 14 IBM Bldes (HS1420) servers, dual core 2.8GHz processors, 4GB memory. Each has a very small IDE disk drive.
  
  
• Several other FUSION servers are also housed in this rack. They are not part of the MOSIX cluster.
  
  
• Cluster totals: 32 processors, 72GB memory, approximately 1.1TB of user space.
  
  

Miscellaneous

The IBM BladeCenter provides 14 client nodes in a relatively small space.

Managing hundreds of wires can get complicated. Neatness counts.