kamadhenu@Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research





Benchmarking:Putting the cluster to test

  After having the cluster up on its feet, bala formally christened it as "KAMADHENU" after the holy cow in Hindu mythology who supposedly grants all your wishes. The christening also had another significance: this particular kind of Beowulf cluster falls within the category of "Cluster Of Workstations or COW !"

    We then set about benchmarking it, i.e. putting it through its paces. To make it work indeed as a parallel computer, we had to install the parallel computing environment into it. Bala chose the LAM implementation of MPI, available for free from the University of Notre Dam (LAM site ).  It was available as a convenient download in "*.rpm" format and installing it was a breeze.  After the installation, we had to set some LAM environment variables in our shell initialization files and at this point we faced the problem wherein the LAM environment wasn't booting properly on the nodes. This problem was traced to the fact that the "/tmp" directories on the nodes weren't having "777" permission (because the system, and not we, had created them) and LAM booted fine as soon as we the had set the proper permissions. After a successful booting of the LAM environment, we downloaded the "lam-test suite" from the Univ. of Notre Dame's site and executed it. It ran flawlessly without a single error, indicating that we were all set for parallel computation!

    Finally, we started off with the barrage of tests like the standard "pingpong" tests on the system to test the parameters like latency and bandwidth. We found that kamadhenu fared particularly well, considering the limitations of diskless nodes and TCP/IP networking. We ran the PINY_MD  molecular dynamics simulation (of water molecules) code on kamadhenu and also on another 3 processor shared memory HP machine (the latest in JNCASR) to compare kamadhenu's perfomance.

To see how kamadhenu fared, click here: test-results

If you are involved in putting together a beowulf cluster and/or are managing one, you may like to have a look at the following page where I have logged all the the software installations and tweaking on kamadhenu:- Additional Configs

Goto Starting page...
Goto configuration page...

So that was the story of bringing kamadhenu, the first Beowulf Cluster of JNCASR, to life. Hope you have enjoyed this journey through to its becoming, with me and bala. We would like to thank the Open Source Community (especially Linux!) for helping make kamadhenu a reality. Also we express our gratitude to Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, India, whose research grants supported kamadhenu.

If you have any comments, suggestions or questions regarding kamadhenu, feel free to contact: Bala   

Page last updated: 6th May, 2000.