Building the Gideon Cluster

  • 3 Oct. 2002: Unpack all the Legend PCs and moved them to HW305.

  • 4-5 Oct. 2002: Network cabling.

  • 7 Oct. 2002, Network Booting Test. 

  • 17 Oct. 2002, Mr. Sit Yiu Fai has run the Linpack using 256 PCs of the Gideon 300 Cluster. The 256 PCs can achieve 290 Gflops, which can be ranked 169th according to the old TOP500 2002/06 list. Later in the same day, Sit reported that we can achieve Linpack performance 304 Gflops using 256 nodes. 304 is about 29.6% efficiency for 256 nodes. In this test, Intel compiler and LAM/MPI were used. Each test runs for slightly more than a hour, with a problem size of 119808. Anthony reported that when he left HW305, the measured room temperature was 36 degree C  (only one air con was working). 

  • 19 Oct. 2002: HKU School Open Day. T he PC Cluster Lab. (HW305) was opened for public. Parallel raytracing and JESSICA2 were shown. (photo)

  • 21 Oct. 2002: Linpack benchmark on the whole Gideon cluster were started.

  • 26 Oct. 2002, GD193 went dead completely. It can't even boot up the BIOS. Besides the broken machine, we found that one machine has the memory error. When we perform the Linpack test, the benchmark result showed that there are errors in the calculated results. After investigation, Ah Sit identified the cause was coming from the memory of a particular machine.

  • 28 Oct. 2002 (11:19): Ah Sit has identified the problem that broke the machine. It is due to the memory failure. There are total 2 machines have been identified with memory problem.

  • 28 Oct. 2002 (13:30): One more machine was dead. Again, due to the memory failure problem. So altogether we have TRHEE broken machines with memory error. Memory bars were replaced.

  • 28 Oct 2002 (18:00): Final Linpack result : 355.5 GFLOPS, N=129600 (Full Report)

  • 6 Nov. 2002, 32 Gideon PCs were allocated for CE2 and SE2 students for doing their POS (principles of operating system) taught by Dr. C.L. Wang.

  • 15 Nov. 2002:  The Gideon 300 cluster has been ranked the 175th on the TOP500 list 11/2002.

  • 4 Dec., 2002: JESSICA2 demo on 64 nodes for a delegation from the Peking University led by Prof. Xuzong Chen (Vice Dean of School of Electronics Engineering & Computer Science) visiting our Department.