The Design, Installation and Management of a Tera-Scale High Throughput Cluster for Particle Physics Research.
Dr Alex Martin, Queen Mary, University of LondonWe describe our experience in building a cost efficient High Throughput Cluster (HTC) using commodity hardware and free software within a university environment. Our HTC has a modular system architecture and is designed to be upgradable. The current, second phase configuration, consists of 344 processors and 20 Tbyte of RAID storage.
In order to rapidly install and upgrade software, we have developed automatic remote system installation and configuration tools to deploy standard software configurations on individual machines. To efficiently manage machines we have written a custom cluster configuration database. This database is used to track all hardware components in the cluster, the network and power distribution and the software configuration. Access to this database and the cluster performance and monitoring systems is provided by a web portal, which allows efficient remote management in our low-manpower environment.
We describe the performance of our system under a mixed load of scalar and parallel tasks and discuss future possible improvements.
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