This project was sponsored by the Australian National University and other Australian organizations. The cluster had 96 dual-CPU machines divided into four groups of 24 machines (nodes) each. Each machine or node had two PIII/550 MHz processors, an EpoX KP6-BS Dual Slot 1 motherboard bas on the Intel 440BX AGPset, 384 MB PC100 SDRAM, a 13.6 GB 7,200-rpm EIDE hard drive with 2 MB cache, a 10/100 Mbps Fast Ethernet NIC with ACPI based on Intel 211432 chipset, two 10/100 Fast Ethernet PCI adapters, and a miditower case with 250W ATX power supply. The nodes contained no video cards, keyboards, floppy drive, CD-ROM drive, etc.

The hardware on the two servers for the Beowulf cluster consisted of the hardware on the nodes, plus a video card, 17" monitor, keyboard, mouse, floppy drive, CD-ROM drive, and a gigabit Ethernet card. Bunyip used Linux as its OS.

The machine clocked a maximal performance of 163 GFlops and a peak performance of 193 GFlops.

In summary, supercomputers are moving well in the two desirable directions—higher speeds and lower costs. Let’s watch how far they can push the envelope.

Pragya Madan