Hampshire College Cluster Computing Facility Institute for Computational Intelligence Adele Simmons Hall School of Cognitive Science Hampshire College Faculty Lee Spector, Director (lspector@hampshire.edu) Jaime Davila (jdavila at hampshie.edu) Chris Perry (perry at hampshire.edu) Systems Support Wm. Josiah Erikson (josiah at insanetechnology.com)

The Hampshire College Cluster Computing Facility houses a high-performance Beowulf-style computer cluster called fly, made up of two formerly separate clusters, listed below. Fly runs the award-winning open-source, GNU/Linux CentOS-based free clustering software, ROCKS (www.rocksclusters.org), which made it possible for us to create one cluster from heterogeneous hardware. It has a total of 132GB of RAM and 80 processors in 40 nodes, including the head node, which is a dual-2.4Ghz Xeon with 4GB of RAM and a 300GB RAID1 array, which is shared by all of the nodes. This cluster is made available to both faculty and students, and gets used for many things: evolutionary computation research, genetic programming, and 3d rendering, just to name a few.

More information about fly, including the current status of the cluster, is available from the fly web page: http://fly.hampshire.edu.

Fly is made up of the following two cabinets:

1. A 23-node cluster supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation for Acquisition of Instrumentation for Research in Genetic Programming, Quantum Computation, and Distributed Systems.
• Compute nodes 1 through 13 are dual 2.4 GHz Xeons with 2GB of RAM each.
• Compute nodes 14 through 23 are dual 3.0 GHz Xeons with 4GB of RAM each.
• Utilizes a 8000amp/11520VA battery backup.
• Runs Alfred, Renderman, Breve, Ganglia, SNSS, and PUSH GP.
• Bought from PSSC labs as a turnkey cluster solution, and run that way until more up-to-date software was needed
2. A 16-node cluster supported by a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency and the Air Force Research Laboratory for the study of Multi-type, Self-adaptive Genetic Programming for Complex Applications. This rack was entirely rebuild from parts, using only the cases and power supplies (and sometimes the hard drives) from the original nodes. The original nodes were AMD Athlon 1.2Ghz Thunderbirds with 768MB of RAM each.
   • Compute nodes 6, 7, and 9 are 2.13Ghz Intel Core 2 Duos with 4GB of RAM each.
   • The remaining 13 nodes are AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ boxes with 4GB of RAM apiece

The Facility resides in Adelle Simmons Hall on the Hampshire College campus. The room was custom designed and built for housing computing clusters with dedicated cooling, discrete AC power, and a concrete slab floor.

The Cluster Computing Facility was formerly known as the Beowulf Computer Laboratory. For general information on Beowulf-style computer clusters see http://www.beowulf.org/.