The ‘Penguins’ & Support Systems
“The Penguins” Application Cluster
After building the first Mathematicians cluster, further donations made additional systems available, which are chiefly used as an application cluster. Each node is named for a species of penguin:
- Rockhopper (Intel Pentium G4400 2 cores @ 3.30 GHz / 32 GB RAM) ***
- Chinstrap (Intel Pentium G4400 2 cores @ 3.3 GHz / 16 GB RAM, 500 GB SSD) ***
- Humboldt (Intel i7-5280 6 cores @ 3.3 GHz / 32 GB RAM, 500 GB SSD) ***
- Adelie ( AMD FX 6300 6 cores @ 3.5 GHz / 16 GB RAM, 500 GB SSD) ****
- Galapagos
Macaroni2 ** (AMD Phenom II X6 1100T 6 cores @ 3.7 GHz / 16 GB RAM, 500 GB SSD) has been retired.
[with thanks to Karl Schmitt(**) and Valpo alumnus Ted Henderson(***), and Paul Smith (****) for their contributions to these systems – and Alex Kaariainen, Craig Behnke, and Preston Petrie for help on the builds.]
Network & Support Systems
A private network links the mathematician and penguins and the systems via secondary ethernet cards. An NFS mount (/mnt/sharedFiles) is provided by noether to the other systems over that private network. Additionally, a Synology DS418 network attached storage (NAS) system with four 4 TB disks in RAID 10 providing ~8 TB storage provides locally-control large storage to support both the Windows and Linux systems.
A number of general purposes Linux workstations support development and systems projects.
The SPRF also hosts two sets of desktops, the Villains:
- goldfinger
- blofeld
- stromberg
- drax
- zorin
- elektra
- kleb
- lechiffre
- silva
- largo
and the Junk-food:
- waffle
- ramen
- dimsum
- baconator
- nugget
- burrito
- slider
- blizzard
- bigmac
- pepperoni
- philly
- frisco
- pretzel
- kungpao
- dumpling
- chowmein
- wonton
- eggroll
- hibachi
- poke
- yakisoba
- tempura
- lemongrass
Each of these sets is linked to the private network in the SPRF, and are configured for clustering via MPI and OpenMP as well.
Thanks to Christian Garcia, Ethan Hawk, and Spencer Gannon for rebuilding and configuring these systems.
The all purpose utility node ferris.valpo.edu is now retired. It ran on an Intel Celeron J1900 Celeron on ASRock IMB-151D Bay Trail / 8 GB RAM) – similar to the LittleFe nodes.
Other Systems
Several other systems can be used as auxiliary compute nodes, assuming they are not supporting courses as front ends to the small form factor parallel nodes:
- plaid.valpo.edu
- tweed.valpo.edu
Both run the Ubuntu distribution of GNU/Linux. These are not linked to the private network, but do have access to the same NFS shares via standard University connections.