Connected WAN-Cluster of UNIX-Type Hosts

摘要

Five far distant machines located at some French, Austrian and Italian research institutions are connected to a WAN-cluster via PVM 3.4.3. The secure shell protocol is used for connection and communication purposes between the different hosts. Operating-Systems, architectures and cpu-performances of all the 5 machines vary from LINUX-2.2.14/INTEL PPro-200MHz, over LINUX-2.2.13/INTEL PII-350MHz, OSF I V5.0/ALPHA EV6-500MHz, IRIX64 6.5/MIPS R10000-195MHz, up to IRIX64 6.5/MIPS R12000-300MHz. An initial benchmark run with the Hartree Fock program GREMLIN reveals a speed difference of roughly a factor 7x between the slowest and the fastest running machine. Taking into account these various speed data within a special dedicated load balancing tool in an initial execution stage of GREMLIN, may lead to a rather well balanced parallel performance and good scaling characteristics for this program if run in such a kind of heterogenous Wide Area Network cluster.