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Desktop Supercomputer - Software
Operating system
Well of course, it had to be Linux didn't it. I chose to run Gentoo (2.6 kernel) for its speed, small footprint, ease of configuration and really excellent documentation. The kernel has been built with the bare minimum of options necessary to support the hardware and network booting.
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Node 0 boots in the normal way from a SATA attached hard disk. During the boot sequence it sends wake-on-lan signals to the other three nodes. The three diskless nodes then PXE boot using node 0 as a DHCP, TFTP and NFS source. Once all four nodes have booted, the clustering software is launched, followed by the Prime application itself.
Clustering
The main number-crunching application on Seymour (named Prime) uses a proprietary clustering solution.
Initial development of the application was done using MPI as a base, but it became apparent that a more specialised, lightweight messaging protocol/library would enable even greater performance.
The new protocol/library uses IPC and TCP messaging and is (very) loosely based on MPI-2.
Prime
Prime is written in C with some small parts written in assembler.
The gcc C compiler has been used to compile the application, although I'm currently in the process of evaluating Intel's ICC compiler after hearing some good reports about its optimiser.
Oracle
I haven't got any plans to install Oracle onto Seymour!
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