High-Density Computing: A 240-Processor Beowulf in One Cubic Meter

Abstract

We present results from computations on Green Destiny, a 240-processor Beowulf cluster which is contained entirely within a single 19-inch wide 42U rack. The cluster consists of 240 Transmeta TM5600 667-MHz CPUs mounted on RLX Technologies motherboard blades. The blades are mounted side-by-side in an RLX 3U rack-mount chassis, which holds 24 blades. The overall cluster contains 10 chassis and associated Fast and Gigabit Ethernet switches. The system has a footprint of 0.5 meter 2 (6 square feet), a volume of 0.85 meter 3 (30 cubic feet) and a measured power dissipation under load of 5200 watts (including network switches). We have measured the performance of the cluster using a gravitational treecode N-body simulation of galaxy formation using 200 million particles, which sustained an average of 38.9 Gflops on 212 nodes of the system. We also present results from a three-dimensional hydrodynamic simulation of a core-collapse supernova.