Building Your Own High Performance Virtual Machine (HPVM)
HPVM's are clusters of commodity PC's which can be used to deliver high
aggregate performance (parallel supercomputing) at a fraction of the cost
of a traditional supercomputer. HPVM's deliver both the computational power,
communication performance, and standard API's for supercomputing, making
the porting of codes a modest effort. HPVM1.0
is developed and released by Concurrent
System Architecture Group(CSAG) , University
of California San Diego . Current efforts in CSAG will allow
supercomputing performance to be extended to distributed HPVM's.
Ingredients:
-
Pentium Pro/Pentium II-based systems. For a range of performance information,
see System
Performance Tests of HPVM 1.0 .
-
Either Myricom's Myrinet (for highest performance HPVM's) or any interconnect
supporting a Winsock 2 or Sockets interface
Software:
Recipe:
1. Install your operating system.
2. If appropriate, install the device driver for the Myrinet interconnect
and create a network configuration file.
3. Start the Global Resource Manager on one of machines in the cluster.
4. Start the Context Manager on all the machines in the cluster.
5. If appropriate, install the Load Sharing Facility. (required only
if you want to use the HPVM front-end)
6. Install the HPVM front-end (required only if you want to use
the HPVM front-end).
7. Install any system utilities required for HPVM that your system
is missing ( See Required
components ).
8. Run the test and validation suite to ensure the HPVM has been properly
installed.
9. Your commodity supercomputer is now ready!
You can now run your HPVM application programs for testing or verifying
your HPVM.
More detailed instructions are available from HPVM
1.0 release documentation .
Back
to HPVM
Back to CSAG home page
Last updated October 2, 1997
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