MegaProto: A Low-Power and Compact Cluster for High-Performance Computing

“MegaProto” is a proof-of-concept prototype for our project “Mega-Scale Computing Based on Low-Power Technology and Workload Modeling”, implementing our key idea that a million-scale parallel system should be built with densely mounted low-power commodity processors. It also serves as a platform to implement and evaluate our new technologies such as power conscious compilation, highly reliable and high performance networking, highly dependable cluster management, and multi-level scalable parallel programming. The building block of the MegaProto is a 1U-high 19 inch-rack mountable motherboard unit on which 16 low-power, one-dollar note-sized, commodity PCarchitecture daughterboards are mounted with a high bandwidth, 2 Gbps per processor network based on Gigabit Ethernet. The peak performance of each unit is 14.4GFlops for the first version and will improve to 38.4 GFlops in the second version through a processor/daughterboard upgrade. The intra- and inter-unit network bandwidt...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: IPPS
• Authors: Hiroshi Nakashima, Hiroshi Nakamura, Mitsuhisa Sato, Taisuke Boku, Satoshi Matsuoka, Daisuke Takahashi, Yoshihiko Hotta
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, Gbps, IPPS 2005, Low-power Commodity Processors, Low-Power Technology