Here is a brief explanation of the support each group has provided:
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LSU's mascot is the Mike the Tiger. LSU tradition is to deconstruct the Tiger and use various related terms for project titles (PAWS is the Student Information System).
Tails carries on this tradition. In addition, geekdom is traditionally filled with puns. In keeping with this tradition, Tails is also a character from Sonic The Hedgehog II. Tails is very fast (unless compared to Sonic) and small. These are characteristics that best describe our cluster. It is small (forced by the power limitations), but very fast for its size (faster than last year's Linpack winner).
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Tails is a traditional Beowulf style supercomputer system. Our 8 node, HP cluster is powered by AMD processors. Gigablt ethernet provides basic connectivity. Mellanox has provided the complete Infiniband subsystem. We are using Centos 5.5 as our base OS. Cobbler is used for node deployment. The Portland Group has provided their compiler suite.
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Our student team started meeting for the Cluster Challenge in late May. Most weeks since then they have gathered on Tuesday night to learn more about clusters, build clusters and learning how build software.
They have grown through 3 clusters since they started. The first one was based on 5 nodes from a retired cluster (dual Xeons with 2 GB Ram and 100 Mb ethernet). The second cluster was borrowed single process, quad core Intel chips with 4 GB Ram. Over time, they were able to borrow enough parts to bring up SDR Infiniband.
Eventually the real system arrived. With HP, we chose to use the AMD Magny Cours 12 core processor. Mellanox provided the IB switch, the cables and the IB cards.
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Here are the specifics for our cluster:
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