Cplant

The Computational Plant project at Sandia National Laboratories is developing a large-scale, massively parallel computing resource from a cluster of commodity computing and networking components. We are combining the knowledge and research of previous and ongoing commodity cluster projects with our expertise in designing, developing, using, and maintaining large-scale MPP machines. This paper describes the main parts of the architecture and discusses the most important design choices and decisions. Scaling to hundreds and thousands of nodes requires more than simply combining readilyavailable software and hardware. We will highlight some of the more crucial pieces that make Cplant scalable. 1 Introduction The Computational Plant (Cplant) project began at Sandia National Laboratories in Spring of 1997. The initial idea was to explore commodity-based cluster technology and build a facility that would provide compute cycles like a power plant provides electricity. Distant sites should b..