Overview

Configuration

The original Parnass configuration consisted of a mixture of single and four-processor Silicon Graphics workstations and servers with R10000 processors connected by a high performance gigabit/s speed network and additionally by switched fast ethernet. All workstations have been given the names of poets and philosophers by our system administrator. The resulting meta-computer is named after the mythological poets' place of assembly, the mountain Parnass. The similarity to the name of some parallel computing projects and companies is accidental.

Parnass consists of a total of 49 (37) processors, some of them are single processors and some shared memory dual processors clustered to 4 processor shared memory machines.The single processor O2 workstation is equiped with 64 - 256Mbytes and the dual processors Origin 200 are equiped with 192 Mbytes main memory. Each processor contains 0.5-1 Mbyte second level cache and 32+32 kbytes instruction anddata first level cache. See the original pages the project pages and the network description for details.

The nodes are connected by a high performance Myrinet network at the speed of 1.28 Gbit/s duplex. The network adapters are connected by a two plane fat tree structure of full crossbar Myricom 8 port switches. Additionally the nodes are connected by fast ethernet. The peak performance of Parnass is 22.4 GFlop/s. Parnass has 4.2 Gbytes of main memory and about 150 Gbytes of hard disk storage. Parnass is used for research on and education in parallel and distributed computing in projects on fluid dynamcis (Navier-Stokes,turbulence simulation), astrophysics (MHD), geology (surface flow), molecular dynamics (Multipole) and parallel algorithms (multilevel).

Parnass₂

The current cluster Parnass2 is based on double-processor PCs with Intel Pentium II processors and the Linux operating system. Currently it containes 128 processors, a switched fast ethernet network for IP trafic and a Myrinet configured as a fat tree for message-passing.

There is a total amount of 27 Gbytes main memory and about 560 Gbytes hard disk storage. The system accounts for 51.2 GFlop/s. Furthermore, in real applications the new system Parnass2 is much faster than the original Parnass, see the performance pages. This is in part due to the fact that the system is dedicated to parallel computing, but basically network and integer computing performance are much better.