Escola Tècnica Superior d’Enginyeria Electrònica i Informàtica La Salle Final Thesis Electronic Engineering A Hybrid Beowulf Cluster Student Tutor Gonçal Roch Colom Dr Joan Verdaguer-Codina Dr Jordi Margalef i Marrugat ACTA DE L'EXAMEN DEL TREBALL FI DE CARRERA The evaluating panel meeting on this day, the student: Gonçal Roch Colom Presented their final thesis on the following subject: A Beowulf Cluster with Intel, AMD and ARM Nodes for Teaching and Research At the end of the presentation and upon answering the questions of the members of the panel, this thesis was awarded the following grade: Barcelona, MEMBER OF THE PANEL MEMBER OF THE PANEL PRESIDENT OF THE PANEL A Hybrid Beowulf Cluster Gonçal Roch-Colom ETSEEI La Salle, Universitat Ramon Llull Tutor: Dr Joan Verdaguer-Codina Co-Tutor: Dr Jordi Margalef Year of Presentation: 2013 Hybrid Beowulf Cluster Abstract Every day, all over the world companies, public and private institutions, and households alike dismiss thousands of old computers. Most are perfectly fine, some are still quite powerful, but they are being replaced with brand new, x86 based units, be it PCs or Macs. Corruption in existing Windows installations, minor hardware faults, ommitances in manually updating the hardware, or generally being deemed 'too old' often lead to their demise. Recycling those forlorn but fully functional pieces of hardware into nodes of a powerful computer cluster for high performance distributed computing seems not only a fascinating challenge but a worthy cause as well, especially in the teaching arena. Extra spice shall be thrown in in the shape of ARM SoCs, a building block to prepare our students for their future role in society. i Hybrid Beowulf Cluster Sumari Cada dia, a tot el món, empreses, organismes públics i privats i particulars estan llençant milers d'ordinadors vells. La majoria estan perfectament bé, alguns són encara molt potents, però els estant canviant per altres de nous amb processadors x86, ja siguin PCs o Macs. Normalment la corrupció en els Windows instal·lats, petits problemes o manques d'actualització en el hardware, o considerar els ordinadors “ja massa vells” condueixen a la seva desaparició. Reciclar aquest hardware perfectament vàlid tot fent-lo formar part d'un cluster d'ordinadors per a la computació distribuïda d'alt rendiment ens sembla no només un repte fascinant, sinó també una bona causa, especialment aplicada a l'educació. Afegirem un toc addicional fent servir també SoCs amb ARM, bàsics per preparar els estudiants per al seu futur. ii Hybrid Beowulf Cluster Acknowledgements I wish to thank Joan Verdaguer for supplying ideas, ceaseless manuscript follow-up and improvement, and believing in me over the years; Jordi Margalef for his help and academic guidance; my wife for encouraging me to pursue this endeavour when time was the scarcest resource; my colleague Miquel Soler for helping out and brainstorming with me; my parents for believing in learning; Steven Vickers for his witty Jupiter Ace User's Guide which shaped my mind in my mid teens; all involved in the inception of the ARM architecture for a source of fascination to me; and last but not least, the great Charles Dickens whose work deeply influenced my life. iii Hybrid Beowulf Cluster Table of Contents 1 Motivation and Objectives......................................................2 1.1 Motivation................................................................................2 1.1.1 Reasoning behind the Motivation..........................................2 1.1.2 Personal Motives....................................................................2 1.2 Objectives.................................................................................3 1.2.1 Using this Project in the Academic world..............................4 1.2.1.1 Students..............................................................................4 1.2.1.2 Teachers..............................................................................4 1.2.1.3 Teacher Training.................................................................4 1.3 Open Source.............................................................................5 2 A Changing Teaching Environment........................................7 2.1 A Revolution in Teaching: Using Computers...........................7 2.2 The Initiatives..........................................................................7 2.2.1 Britain....................................................................................8 2.3 The Everis Poll, STEM............................................................9 2.4 Linux, not Windows...............................................................11 3 Beowulf and its Background.................................................14 3.1 Definition of a Beowulf Cluster..............................................14 3.2 Hybrid and Heterogeneous.....................................................14 4 Brief History of Architectures...............................................17 4.1 x86 dominates the PC scene...................................................17 4.2 The Relevance of ARM..........................................................18 4.2.1 The ARM in the Pi..............................................................19 4.3 x86 vs ARM...........................................................................20 4.4 Tablets, smartphones, netbooks and aspiring desktops..........21 4.5 1980s - Occam and Transputers.............................................22 5 Brief History of OSs..............................................................24 5.1 MS-DOS and Windows...........................................................24 iv Hybrid Beowulf Cluster 5.1.1 The Demise of the Home PC..............................................25 5.1.2 Apple's dominance and the personal computer...................25 5.1.3 The Future of the Personal Computer................................26 5.2 Early 1990s.............................................................................26 5.2.1 MINIX..................................................................................26 5.2.2 Linux....................................................................................27 5.3 1990s.......................................................................................28 5.4 2000s: Render Farms..............................................................28 5.5 Beowulf as a Valid Alternative...............................................29 6 The Future............................................................................31 6.1 Mont-Blanc.............................................................................31 6.2 UPC's Scientific, Technical and Educational Training..........32 7 The Raspberry Pi..................................................................34 8 A Heterogeneous Cluster.......................................................37 8.1 Symmetric Load Balancing.....................................................37 8.1.1 Finest Grain: the Coimbra approach....................................37 8.1.2 Benchmarking nodes: the HINT benchmark........................37 8.2 Asymmetric Load Balancing..................................................38 8.3 Quibbles.................................................................................38 8.4 Potential for Further Research...............................................38 9 HBC Overview......................................................................41 9.1 Network Topology..................................................................41 9.1.1 Head / Master Node: RaspberryPi.......................................41 9.1.1.1 RaspberryPi99...................................................................41 9.1.1.2 Rest of Nodes.....................................................................41 9.2 Software..................................................................................41 9.2.1 Raspbian OS on Master and Compute Nodes......................41 9.2.2 Ubuntu 10.04.4 OS on Compute Nodes................................42 9.2.3 Rest of software needed........................................................42 10 Hardware - Building the System.........................................44 10.1 Picking up the Bits...............................................................44 v Hybrid Beowulf Cluster 10.2 The Dell Poweredge 1500sc Server.......................................44 10.3 The 3 HP Kayaks.................................................................45 10.4 The Webgine 1115XL laptop Hardware................................46 10.5 The HP Pavilion AMD64 based laptop.................................46 10.6 The AMD Athlon based brandless desktop...........................47 10.7 The Raspberry Pi..................................................................47 10.8 Communications...................................................................48 10.9 Physical Layout: Positioning the PC's.................................48 11 Network – Building the System...........................................51 11.1 The Downton Cluster...........................................................51 11.2 IP addresses and node names...............................................51 12 Software - Building the System...........................................53 12.1 Previous Considerations.......................................................53 12.2 General Procedure on PC's...................................................53 12.2.1 Partitioning........................................................................53