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Research Seminar - December 01, 2000
Seminar Announcement
| Title: |
Cluster Computing Architectures and Applications
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| Speaker: |
Paul D. Coddington
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Distributed and High-Performance Computing Group
Department of Computer Science
Adelaide University
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| Date: |
Friday 1st December, 2000 |
| Time: |
12.00pm |
| Venue: |
Seminar Room 1.24 |
Abstract
Over the past few years, clusters of networked computers have become
very popular as a low-cost alternative to traditional supercomputers.
The dramatic improvements in performance (and more importantly, the
ratio of price/performance) of commodity PCs, workstations, and networks
have made clusters of off-the-shelf computers an attractive option for
low-cost, high-performance computing, particularly for scientific
applications.
The Distributed and High-Performance Computing Group at Adelaide
University has been working with computational scientists in chemistry,
physics and engineering on planning, proposal development, and procurement
of two large compute clusters which were installed in the past year.
Both of these machines have a peak performance of over 100 GFlops, making
them among the fastest supercomputers in Australia.
In this talk I will give an overview of cluster computing, and describe
the architecture of the two machines at Adelaide: a home-made commodity
PC (or Beowulf) cluster, and a commercial cluster from Sun Microsystems.
I will also discuss work on benchmarking of the machines, and the porting
and performance of some parallel application codes.
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