A doc photo album

This is the set of cluster nodes; the rack is a Home Depot special!

On the left is doc's monster head node with room for 25 drives; currently we have 12 disks on a RAID 5 array for data; the system disk is a mirrored pair. To support the power needs of all these disks, the head node has an 815 Watt redundant power supply! On the right is our hefty UPS.

Doc's cables: what a mess! Of course, we could have paid twice the price and it would have looked much nicer.

Here are the KVM (keyboard/video/mouse) connections. We ran out of room on the first KVM switch (the middle unit), so we added overflow on a smaller KVM (top). On the bottom is the Dell Powerconnect 24-port managed gigabit switch, which supports jumbo packets (9000 bytes). Strangely, we have found better performance with standard packet sizes of around 1500 bytes, even on bandwidth sensitive codes.

The whole doc: just imagine settling in for an evening with one of these puppies!

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0305719. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.