Department of Informatics Technische Universität München Informatik X: Rechnertechnik und Rechnerorganisation / Parallelrechnerarchitektur Prof. Dr. Arndt Bode , Prof. Dr. Hans Michael Gerndt

The SISCI Project is an EU funded project to establish and use well defined software interfaces for SCI-based clusters of commodity PCs or workstations. This software will include message passing as well as shared memory approaches and will be based on the known standards MPI, PVM, and the POSIX thread interface. All of these packages will themselves be based on top of yet to be defined low-level APIs to allow the abstraction of the underlying hardware layers as well as quick ports across platforms and/or operating systems. The SISCI software will be utilized and tested by real-world applications.

Figure: SISCI layer model

Our work within the project will mainly consist of the implementation of the PVM library and the Pthreads package on top of a four node PC cluster running Windows NT. More information on the two work packages can be found here:

• SISCI PVM

• SISCI Pthreads

More information about SCI can be found on the SMiLE homepage.

The SISCI projects also includes a full industral applications from the area of CFD provided by AEA technology used to test the performance and robustness of the SISCI PVM application.

Within the context of the project we have set up a PC cluster consisting of 4 PCs interconnected via SCI. The exact configuration of each PC is as follows:

SCENIC CELCIUS 2000:

Processor:	Intel Pentium-II 233 MHz
L-2 Cache:	512 KByte
Main board:	System board D1005 (SNI)
Chipset:	Intel 440FX
Main memory:	128 MB
HDD-Adapter:	SCSI Adaptec 2940UW
Disk:	2 GB (IBM)
Graphics adapter:	Matrox Millenium (4MB)
Network:	Dolphin PCI-SCI Bridge Rev B
	Intel EtherExpress 10/100B

Operating systems:

Windows NT Workstation 4.0 (Service Pack 3)

Linux (Kernel 2.0.32)

SISCI links:

• The official project home page maintained by Parallab/Bergen

• The official synopsis of the project

All project partners:

• SCI Hardware:

  • Dolphin, Oslo/Norway

• Software layers:

  • Parallab, Bergen/Norway
  • Department of Computer Science, Munich University of Technology, Munich/Germany

• Applications (Data acquisition):

  • CERN, Geneva/Switzerland
  • Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Didcot/United Kingdom

• Applications (Fluid mechanics):

  • AEA, formerly Advanced Scientific Computing GmbH, Otterfing/Germany
  • EMU Unterwasserpumpen, Hof/Germany

• System integration:

  • SCALI Computers, Oslo/Norway

This work is supported by the European Commission in the Fourth Framework Programme under ESPRIT HPCN Project EP23174 (Standard Software Infrastructure for SCI based Parallel Systems - SISCI).

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