Havat tzabbim (turtle farm): the Martin group PBS cluster

In its present configuration, our turtle farm consists of twelve Intel IA32-boxed, one quad-CPU AMD Opteron 846, and two legacy Alpha machines. One of the linux boxes (harriet) acts as a file server and a bridge between the Weizmann LAN and a private network (192.168.1.x). The alphas (and, for now, the quad Opteron) sit on the Weizmann LAN, the remaining Linux machines on the private network. Connectivity between the latter and harriet is provided by a 24-port 100baseT Hewlett-Packard Procurve network switch with a Gbit-copper transceiver module. The latter is connected to the "private" network card of harriet (itself obviously Gbit-copper). All our Linux machines originally ran RedHat 7.2. Later they ran RedHat 8.0 with kernel 2.4.20-18. The standard kernel shipping with RedHat 8.0, i.e. 2.4.18-14, is a piece of bugware. Recently, all Linux machines were brought to SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 (which at the time was all we had that ran 64-bit native on an AMD Opteron).

Overview of hardware

Aside from a 24-port (100baseT) Hewlett-Packard network switch with an added Gigabit-copper transceiver, our cluster at present consists of the following hardware:

Installed software