In December GridCentric performed a beta installation of its Copper Cluster Operating System on a SHARCNET cluster at York University in Toronto. The cluster has 32 compute nodes, each with two dual-core Opteron processors and 8GB of RAM, for a total of 128 compute cores and 256GB of memory. The cluster also includes 4TB of RAID5 storage, as well as Myrinet 2G low-latency interconnect between each node.Total installation time was around five hours, 4.5 of which were spent installing Fedora on the login node, head node, and storage node. After that was completed, we booted the compute nodes into our Copper compute image and the cluster was ready for action.
Here's a picture of the Copper admin console showing an Ubuntu 9.04 virtual cluster running a single virtual machine (click for larger image):
Here's the same "Virtual Cluster" after expanding out to 85 VMs (click for larger image):
This "footprint expansion" takes a few seconds. Try that on EC2!
For a better idea of what's going on, take a look at out our demo at DCT24.
