Plans are to upgrade the cluster to 24-48 processors following the initial demonstration. This talk will discuss the experience in purchasing the Origin 2000 and Beowulf cluster and contrast them in terms of not only system architecture and performance but also in terms of purchase and maintenance costs. The importance of benchmarking the different computer systems with the user's application code will also be discussed. For applications that can utilize a distributed memory parallel computing architecture the Beowulf is an extremely viable computing platform. It is desirable to store as much of these data as possible on-line for access and analysis by distributed physics collaborations.
Maximum bandwidth is critical.
In ZFS, file locking and other meta-data level operations are carried out over the primary data network, after which all data are sent directly over a Fibre Channel between the workstation and the disk cluster. No intermediate server is required. Substantially higher throughputs than in traditional networked disk architectures have been demonstrated. The ZFS architecture will be described and tests of the first implementation of ZFS at Fermilab will be discussed. The current system is implemented for Linux and is being optimized for Fermilab's needs, but extensions to other operating systems and other data-intensive applications are clearly foreseen.