Hardware

Welcome to the HCL Cluster. This cluster is designed to provide a controllable heterogeneous environment for research in heterogeneous computing. The hcl cluster is heterogeneous in computing hardware & network ability.

Nodes are from Dell, IBM, and HP, with Celeron, Pentium 4, Xeon, and AMD processors ranging in speeds from 1.8 to 3.6Ghz. Accordingly architectures and parameters such as Front Side Bus, Cache, and Main Memory all vary. Operating System used is Debian “squeeze” with Linux kernel 2.6.32.

The network hardware consists of two Cisco 24+4 port Gigabit switches. Each node has two Gigabit ethernet ports - each eth0 is connected to the first switch, and each eth1 is connected to the second switch. The switches are also connected to each other. The bandwidth of each port can be configured to meet any value between 8Kb/s and 1Gb/s. This allows testing on a very large number of network topologies, As the bandwidth on the link connecting the two switches can also be configured, the cluster can actually act as two separate clusters connected via one link.