Middle Earth Cluster
What Is:

Beowulf Cluster

Ubuntu powered

Debian Like Linux

The Middle Earth cluster is a very small and underpowered cluster with the sole purpous of learning.

It serves as a step towards a much bigger cluster we'll need in order to process our real data and to make real predictions and models about nature.

Another purpose is to learn and be proficient at cluster technologies of at least: monitoring alarms, process spawning and load balancing, distributed computing, network design and security.

All code and solutions will be released on this site (or other linked from here) under the GPL license.

A good place to look for updates on this cluster is the blog.

If you have any comment or suggestion about anything (from network design to our code) please say so by sending an email to me at rengolin at gmail dot com.

Thank you!


Infrastructure: MiddleEarth is a very small cluster. We're currently running it with 5 machines, one administration node and four computational nodes. All nodes are identical (except for one that have a smaller disk) and this is the basic configuration:

CPU2 x Pentium III 800 / 256Kb L2
Memory1024 Mb
Disk46.1Gb (one is 20Gb)
OSUbuntu 7.04 Server
Interfaces2 x Intel Network cards / 2 x USB / Serial
MediaNo CD / No Floppy

The nodes were named (as you already expected): Gandalf (the master node), Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin.

Apart from cluster services, Gandalf have the following services:

  • BOOTP / TFTP installation of the nodes: disabled
  • DHCPD disabled, to enable when DNS is ready
  • Firewall disabled, idem
  • Proxy Squid to save bandwidth when upgrading
  • NFS Server While we don't have a PVFS running
  • Apache interface for local tools
  • LAM MPI To upgrade to OpenMPI
  • Mon Monitoring all nodes and server disk and apache

    The services in the TODO list are:

  • DNS And get rid of static IPs
  • PVFS Shared disk among all nodes
  • SGE To spawn jobs

    Please, check our pictures of the cluster.


    • Networking: The network is optimized to get the most bandwidth to the cluster without mixing it's traffic with the outer network (for the sake of both cluster and my home network).

    Gandalf is acting as a Firewall / Router. The outside link is at the first interface, the second interface connects to a 10/100 Switch which connects to all other nodes.

    This way, the outside network cannot see the computational nodes directly and they only see the outside world through Gandalf.


    Software: I'm folloing the KISS rule and trying to use only tools directly available from Ubuntu packages list.

  • Mon: The monitoring service, installed on all machines to monitor local resources and on the head node to monitor network and main servces.
  • LAM-MPI: The Message Passing Interface from LAM. A very powerfull and simple to use MPI implementation.
  • MPeasy: A tool I'm developing to make LAM MPI use even easier.


    • Use: It's still being built, so the only use for now is acquiring expertise.


    Rengolin This page was created using Vim