September 2002 - New Sun Scrap Cluster Available

scrap \'skrap\ n - manufactured articles or parts rejected or discarded and useful only as material for reprocessing

A cluster of 15 Sun Ultra 5s is now available on the CS network. The nodes in this cluster are named scrap00 through scrap14 and are all identical 300MHz Sun Ultra 5s with 256MB of memory. These machines are workstations that have been taken out of service because they have poor graphics. However, they stack quite nicely in a rack so we decided to resurrect them as this little cluster where the graphics is not an issue. We see this cluster as an ideal place for remote processing and experimentation with distributed programming.

This cluster is part of the Whale/Sharkestra domain so anyone with a CS Sharkestra account can use these machines. There is also a DNS CNAME set up so you can access a random node using the name scrap.cs.indiana.edu. For example, you can just

ssh scrap.cs.indiana.edu

to connect to a random node.

If you want to write MPI code to distribute a job across these machines you may want to check out the software database entries for LAM/MPI and MPICH.

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