The Hampshire College Cluster Computing Facility houses a high-performance Beowulf-style computer cluster called fly, made up of two formerly separate clusters, listed below. Fly runs the award-winning open-source, GNU/Linux CentOS-based free clustering software, ROCKS (www.rocksclusters.org), which made it possible for us to create one cluster from heterogeneous hardware. It has 80 processors in 40 nodes, including the head node, which is a dual-2.4Ghz Xeon with 4GB of RAM and a 300GB RAID1 array, which is NFS-shared by all of the nodes. This cluster is made available to both faculty and students, and gets used for many things: evolutionary computation research, genetic programming, and 3-D rendering, just to name a few.

We now have a temperature and power monitoring unit that will alert us when temperatures in the room get out of hand or when we partially lose power. Check it out

Fly is made up of the following two cabinets:

1. A 23-node cluster supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation for Acquisition of Instrumentation for Research in Genetic Programming,
   Quantum Computation, and Distributed Systems.
• Compute nodes 1 through 13 are dual 2.4 GHz Xeons with 2GB of RAM each.
• Compute nodes 14 through 23 are dual 3.0 GHz Xeons with 4GB of RAM each.
• Utilizes a 8000amp/11520VA battery backup.
• Runs Alfred, Renderman, Breve, Ganglia, SNSS, and PUSH GP.
• Bought from PSSC labs as a turnkey cluster solution, and run that way until more up-to-date software was needed
2. A 16-node cluster supported by a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency and the Air Force Research Laboratory for the study of Multi-type, Self-adaptive Genetic Programming for Complex Applications. This rack was upgraded over the course of 2007, and all of the motherboards, processors, and RAM were replaced, along with many of the hard drives. This was funded by the School of Cognitive Science. The nodes were originally 1.2Ghz Athlons with 768MB of RAM apiece. Their present configuration:
   • All nodes have 4GB of RAM apiece
   • Compute nodes 6, 7, and 9 have 2.13Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processors
   • Compute node 4 has an AMD Athlon64 X2 4800+ processor
   • The remaining compute nodes have AMD Athlon64 X2 5000+ processors

The Facility resides in Adelle Simmons Hall on the Hampshire College
campus. The room was custom designed and built for housing computing clusters with dedicated cooling, discrete AC power, and a concrete slab floor.

The Cluster Computing Facility was formerly known as the Beowulf Computer Laboratory.
For general information on Beowulf-style computer clusters see http://www.beowulf.org/.