Development of a Beowulf-class high performance computing system for computational science applications

Abstract

In the Philippines today, computing power in the range of gigaflops is not generally available for use in research and development. Conventional supercomputers or high performance computing systems are very expensive and are beyond the budgets of most university research groups especially in developing countries such as the Philippines. A lower cost option available to such research groups is to establish cluster of high performance a workstations designed to work in parallel.
The High Performance Computing Group of the Ateneo de Manila University has developed AGILA, which stands for the Ateneo Beowulf-Class Supercomputer with Gigaflops-Range Performance, Linux Operating System, and Athlon Processors. It consists of eight (8) compute nodes connected by a 100Mbps Fast Ethernet and supports parallel programming using message passing software such as LAM-MPI and PVM. As a scalable high performance computing system, AGILA can be increased to 64 compute nodes.
AGILA is an interdisciplinary project (mathematics, physics and engineering, and computer science) aimed at supporting the computational science and engineering research at the Ateneo de Manila University. It is also intended to support the parallel computing courses offered by the Ateneo de Manila University, particularly those computational subjects offered in the applied mathematics/computational science program of the Mathematics Department.