Cluster Overview

If your group is planning on purchasing dedicated compute resources please contact help@csail.mit.edu to see if your needs would be better served by buying into our cluster system.

TIG has built out a flexible, reconfigurable compute clustering environment which is able to serve both as a lab wide batch queued cluster based on Condor and also host private or priority access nodes for groups who purchase dedicated hardware. The short initial proposal(PDF format) was made in August 2006 after a period of testing various cluster options.

The design, illustrated above, allows the integration or separation of three main components: the queuing systems, the virtualization system, and existing physical servers. The intersections show the areas discussed in this document. The non-intersecting areas suggest the possibilities outside the scope of this document, most notably the existing private group compute resources in their current stand-alone configuration, the possibility of virtualizing infrastructural services, and the possibility of incorporationg workstation idle cycle harvesting into the queing system.

-- JonProulx - 08 Aug 2007