This site describes creation of "Hrothgar", a Beowulf Machine intended for use in a number of high school curricula. (Hrothgar is the sage king in the Beowulf story. The name seems appropriate both in terms of continuing the Caltech naming conventions and in terms of the intended educational applications for the machine.) Participating schools are part of the EdTech consortium, a project involving several school districts in the San Gabriel Valley area of Southern California. The initial hrothgar system used four Pentium-Pro PCs. Participating school districts are encouraged to contribute an additional PC to the system, and it is expected that hrothgar will eventually grow into a 16-PC Beowulf machine.

Hrothgar was put together largely by a group of non-experts. The pages listed below document the construction process, and hopefully can provide some assistance for others attempting to build a "commodity mini-supercomputer". (During the construction process, these pages also served as a public record of our actions in a format which the real experts could read and correct. This proved to be quite useful.)

Site Contents

Hardware
A brief description of the actual hardware (PCs, switch, ...) used to build Hrothgar.

Preliminary Data Collection
Summary of hardware and network information needed before the actual start of the Linux installation process. This section also contains a brief discussion of the NFS strategy for using the hard drives on the hrothgar PCs.

Loading Linux On The Master PC
Details of Linux installation on the first PC, focusing on "project-specific" elaborations of the on-line RedHat installation manual.

Prepping The Master PC
Summary of unix-level changes in the Master PC to provide NFS services for Linux installation on the remaining PCs.

Loading Linux On The Remaining PCs
Summaries of the (minor) modifications in the Linux installation procedure used for the remaining PCs. Note: the "dumb" NFS procedure used here is nowhere nearly as efficient as the "cloning" procedure used for truly large Beowulf systems, but it was quite adequate for the small hrothgar system.

Additional Unix-Level Configurations
Descriptions of the various system files (fstab, .rhosts, etc.) used to enable the NFS and rsh functions used by MPICH.

Installing and Testing MPICH
The (really easy) steps taken to install the MPICH communications system on hrothgar.

Footnote: The portrait of Hrothgar at the top of this page is "derived" from a drawing by Randy Groceske, as taken from David Breeden's adaptation of the Beowulf Story. Technical images on the following pages were stolen from The RedHat Site.