Sunday, 20 January, 2002

More Super Computing

Everybody comes up with creative names for their Beowulf clusters.  At Catapult Systems, our computers are named for "things in the sea."  My computer, for example, is Blowfish.  We have Humpback, Stingray, Mantaray, Grouper, etc.  I was going to call my cluster "School" (i.e. a group of fish), but that name was met with some resistance.  For the moment, I'm calling it "The Fishery."  The individual computer names were easy enough.  I was going to call them fish1, fish2, etc., but then the president suggested onefish, twofish, redfish, bluefish.  I'll have to make a trip to the kids section at the local bookstore for the Dr. Seuss classic so I can get more names.

Right now, I only have two machines on the cluster.  onefish is a 333 MHz Pentium 2 with 128 MB of RAM.  twofish is a 200 MHz Pentium with 64 MB of RAM.  Both are running SuSE Linux 7.0 with pretty much identical configurations (SuSE minimum system to which I've added a few networking services and some development tools).  Below are the results from some benchmark tests I ran last night.  All times are to render the skyvase.pov using this command line:

./pvmpov +iskyvase.pov +h480 +w640 +FT +v1 -x -d +a0.300 -q9 -mv2.0 -b1000 -nw32 -nh32 -nt4 -L/home/research/pvmpov3_1g_2/povray31/include

Computer Time
onefish 1:53
twofish 4:52
cluster (onefish host) 1:24
cluster (twofish host) 1:24

So the addition of twofish to the cluster drops the time from 1:53 to 1:24, a difference of 29 seconds, or about 25 percent.  Not bad.  It'll be interesting to see what happens as I add the four 166 machines.