Introduction

• Nature of the Computer

  The Hive Cluster is a collection of seventy roughly identical commodity computers. Each node has it's own system image and memory that is entirely separate from the rest of the cluster. This type of cluster is programmed with message passing to take advantage of parallelism.

• How do I use it?

  Computational jobs on the cluster are scheduled and run in a space-shared, exclusive access fashion. This means that when your job is running on a node, no other jobs are running on that node at the same time. In order to achieve this, we use two job queuing services, PBS and Condor. These services use information that you submit about your job such as the number of nodes and the amount of time that you request to schedule jobs in as fair a fashion as possible. The usual use pattern of the cluster is as follows:

  1. Submit a job
  2. Job scheduler schedules jobs on multiple nodes
  3. Job scheduler starts API on single node
  4. Parallel API starts process on allocation
  5. Your process runs and exits
  6. Job scheduler reports results

• What the cluster is not

  The Hive Cluster is not a shared memory machine. This means that one needs to use explicit parallelism beyond multithreaded code in order to take advantage of the cluster. The cluster will not parallelize jobs for you.