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References and Related Info


Intro

Monolith is a beowulf-class parallel computer in the Washington University Physics Department. It runs the Linux operating system (Scyld Beowulf Professional Distribution). Monolith was created by student members of the Gamma-ray Group and the High Energy Theory group . The hardware was selected, purchased, and assembled by Richard Bose , who was an undergraduate physics major and is now a consultant.

Monolith was created to provide physics students a platform for running fast numerical computations and simulations without the need for buying time on a supercomputer.

Current Hardware

  • 1 master node:

    • 2.2 GHz Athlon XP processor
    • Gigabyte 7NNXP motherboard
    • Kingston 1 GB DDR400 Ram
    • ATI Radeon 7000 32MB PCI Video Card
    • 5 36GB Quantum Atlas 10K II SCSI hard disks
    • CI Design 4U RAID case
  • 17 slave nodes:

    • 2.2 GHz Athlon XP processor
    • Gigabyte 7N400-L1 motherboard
    • Kingston 1 GB DDR400 Ram
    • IBM 15/20GB or WD 40GB hard disk for temp storage
    • ATI video card
    • Antec 2u rackmount cases
  • Two APC SmartUPS 2200
  • /home is a 105GB redundant raid1 array
  • Hammond rack-mount cabinet
  • Belkin 16-port KVM switch
  • Dlink 24-port + 2 Gbit ethernet switch
See the pictures page for views of Monolith.

Current Software

Monolith runs Scyld Linux Professional, which is based on Red Hat linux. It therefore contains all of the standard Red Hat programs and development utilities. MPI (Message Passing Interface) is used for parallel computing. There is no support planned for PVM, since MPI contains all the functionality of PVM and is better supported by the Scyld distribution.

Monolith is a completely Microsoft-free machine.

Cost

  • A mere $32,161
  • 56304 MFlops
  • $0.57 per MFlop

Performance

Tests show that Monolith's performance is on-par with a 64-processor $500,000 Origin 2000 in both well parallelized code and code that demands much intercommunication.

Administrators

For account information or problems, please contact:
LAST UPDATE: Tue Sep 29 11:28:58 2009 , Karl Kosack <kosack_at_hbar.wustl.edu>
Some images on this page from "2001: A Space Odyssey", MGM Studios 1968.