The UCSC/HHMI Kilokluster project
| The purpose of the UCSC/HHMI Kilokluster project is to provide high throughput computational services for bioinformatics applications. With over one thousand processors operating in parallel, the KiloKluster might be one of the most powerful computational clusters used for bioinformatics in the world. Because of the massive growth that UCSC has been experiencing, space has been a primary issue in the planning of this project. Thanks to the space saving designs of Rackable Systems, the KiloKluster occupies only nine racks and is less than one hundred square feet in size. The KiloKluster consists of 504 compute nodes. Each compute node contains two Pentium III processors running at 866Mhz, a gigabyte of memory, and a forty gigabyte hard drive. The compute nodes are divided into eight sub-clusters, each with its own switching apparatus and server. The compute nodes are networked using fast ethernet, and the sub-clusters are connected to each other and to a main server through a gigabit ethernet switch. Sun's open source Gridware software is used to assign tasks to the compute nodes. We chose Gridware primarily because of its open source (thanks Sun!), and its ease of use compared to other open source schedulers. Technical questions may be directed to cluster-admin@cse.ucsc.edu. |