What is the Cplant machine?
The Cplant machine is a parallel computer constructed entirely from commodity personal computer hardware. • Is it another Beowulf machine? Not really. The Cplant project has some broader goals than traditional Beowulf systems. We are not trying to build a machine for a small number of users to run a small number of applications on a small number of machines. We are trying to build a production machine for hundreds of users to run all types of parallel applications on potentially thousands of nodes. We are essentially trying to build a commodity-based machine patterned after the design of the Intel TeraFLOPS machine. • What does each node contain? Each new phase is composed of different hardware. For a detailed list of the hardware used in each phase, click on buttons for the different phases. • How are the machines connected together? The machines are connected with Myricom’s Myrinet gigabit networking hardware. Each node contains a SAN PCI card connected to a 16-port SAN/LAN switch. T
