Beowulf in Italy!

[Giovanni Scalmani]

Hi!

  We are really happy to announce the birth of 'Italian Renaissance'!

Leonardo, Michelangelo, Galileo, Machiavelli, Brunelleschi, Raffaello,
Tiziano and Donatello are the names of our 8 dual PII nodes ... don't
worry, we have aliases for those names! :-)  

To our knowledge (but we could be wrong) this is the first Linux PC
cluster devoted to number crunching in Italy.

Renaissance is an initiative of Prof. Demetrio Pitea research group
and it has been funded by the University of Milan. 

This beowulf will become the major in-house computational resource 
for our group and will mainly be used for quantum chemistry ab-initio
calculations.

A modified version of the Gaussian94 system of programs has been 
developed in our group, which uses MPI as message passing tool and
ScaLAPACK for matrix operations. 

The best performance achieved so far was  

  2160 Wall MFlops : xdpblas3tim scalapack test
                     square matrix-matrix multiplication
                     4 x 4 process grid 
                     N = 3200, NB = 400 
                     using the optimized BLAS library from
                        www.cs.utk.edu/~ghenry/distrib
             
The hardware list is:

1 x dual PentiumII 350Mhz
    Asus P2B-DS motherboard (BX 100Mhz chipset, 
                             on-board AIC7890 U2W SCSI controller)
    256 MBytes SDRAM
    9 Gb SCSI drive
    100baseT Fast Ethernet card (rtl8139 chipset)
    10baseT Ethernet card
    
7 x dual PentiumII 350Mhz
    Asus P2B-DS motherboard
    256 MBytes SDRAM
    4.5 Gb SCSI drive
    100baseT Fast Ethernet card (rtl8139 chipset)

1 x Netgear FS508 8-way Fast Ethernet switch

The total cost was less the 50.000.000 italian lire.

We bought all the hardware from:
AREANOVE Soluzioni Informatiche s.r.l. 
Via Caruso, 7
I-20133 Milano (Italy)

We are running RedHat5.1 with kernel 2.0.35 patched with the latest
aic7xxx driver (thank you Doug Ledford!) which can be found at
ftp.dialnet.net/pub/linux/aic7xxx. Thanks also to Donald Becker for
his constantly improving rtl8139 driver.

Give us the time to build a website which will deserve the name we
gave to our beowulf ... in the meantime you can contact me for any
further informations.

Thanks,
Giovanni

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Scalmani Giovanni, PhD student           giovanni@sg2.csrsrc.mi.cnr.it
Dipartimento di Chimica Fisica ed Elettrochimica 
Universita' degli Studi di Milano 
via C.Golgi, 19                                 Phone: ++39-2-26603254
20133 Milano (Italy)                              Fax: ++39-2-70638129
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