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What Is The Jane Cluster?

Overview

Jane Option Black is a privately built Beowulf-style clustered computing environment. Jane is a network of dedicated nodes built from COTS hardware, and using open source software.

Hardware Architecture
Nodes comprising the cluster range from 486DX4-100 machines to Pentium-333 machines, with most machines falling into the Pentium range. Most machines in the cluster serve as nodes only, with some minor exceptions. One machine is also a Sybase SQL server, and another serves as the front end/primary node for the cluster. Nodes on the cluster also expose several directories to the main node in order to share storage space on the cluster.

The network backplane for Jane is currently an Ethernet 100baseTX non-switched network, with plans on upgrading to a switched network in the near future. There are currently no plans for upgrading Jane to channel bonding architecture.

Software architecture

All machines on the cluster use the Linux Mandrake 6.0 installation, slightly augmented. Kernels on all machines are upgraded to version 2.2.14, and have been altered with the Mosix kernel patch in order to implement kernel level load balancing within the cluster. In addition, all nodes run MPICH version 1.2.1 as the primary parallel computing paradigm.

Directory structure
The directory structure for Jane is as follows:

Primary Node (Mandrake01)

Exported:

/home

/mpich-1.2.1

/mnt/cdrom

Imported:

/,/vol1, /vol2 from every node in the cluster

On the primary node, there is a directory named /cluster,

which maps to each of the worker nodes:

/cluster

|___Mandrake01 -- root of Mandrake01 (the primary node,

| i.e., localhost, is mounted here)

|___Mandrake02 -- root of Mandrake02 (worker node 1) is

| mounted here

|___MandrakeNN -- root of MandrakeNN (worker node

| NN-1) is mounted here

|___vols

|___vol1

|___vol2

|___vol3

...

|___volN -- volumes exposed by the worker

nodes are mounted here

Worker Nodes (Mandrake02..MandrakeNN)

Exported :

/

/vol1

/vol2

Imported :

/home -- /home is mounted from the primary node

/mpich-1.2.1 -- each node runs MPICH from the primary nnode

/usr -- each node mounts the /usr directory froom the primary node

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