On Construction of a Diskless Cluster Computing Environment in a Computer Classroom

Abstract

This paper’s objective is to implement and evaluate a high-performance computing environment by clustering idle PCs (personal computers) with diskless slave nodes on campuses to obtain the effectiveness of the largest computer potency. Two sets of Cluster platforms, BCCD and DRBL, are used to compare computing performance. It’s to prove that DRBL has better performance than BCCD in this experiment. Originally, DRBL was created to facilitate instructions for a Free Software Teaching platform. In order to achieve the purpose, DRBL is applied to the computer classroom with 32 PCs so to enable PCs to be switched manually or automatically among different OS (operating systems). The bioinformatics program, mpiBLAST, is executed smoothly in the Cluster architecture as well. From management’s view, the state of each Computation Node in Clusters is monitored by “Ganglia”, an existing Open Source. The authors gather the relevant information of CPU, Memory, and Network Load for each Computation Node in every network section. Through comparing aspects of performance, including performance of Swap and different network environment, they attempted to find out the best Cluster environment in a computer classroom at the school. Finally, HPL of HPCC is used to demonstrate cluster performance.