Full document of Dave Probert's write-up on Meiko-CS2 is accessible by anonymous ftp in ftp.cs.ucsb.edu under pub/ftp/meiko/handout-940805.txt.
CS-2 is an massively parallel machine manufactured by the Meiko company. The Department of Computer Science at UCSB purchased a 64-processor CS-2 in June 1994.
Hardware architecture. The Meiko CS-2 is essentially a collection of SPARCstation 10s with a fast network interconnection. Each node has a SUN 40MHz SPARC Viking superscalar processor for computation with a peak performance 40M flop per second. Each node also has a Sparc-like processor to deal with communication, 32MB memory and 1MB external cache
The structure of the CS-2 data communication network (called Elan) is a multi-stage packet-switching fat-tree. The Elan network provides 40MB/sec node-to-node sustainable bandwidth with 10 microsecond latency.
Software. All nodes run the Solaris 2.3 operating system and each node can be regarded as a SUN workstation. Any binary code that runs in a SUN workstation should be able to run in each CS-2 node. The OS at each node also has extensions to support the Elan communication network. The Message passing paradigms supported:
Other software supported are:
Some useful system utilities: allocate/prun/rinfo - commands for parallel running of programs; pandora - a graphical program for viewing machine state; paragraph - a parallel program analysis tool.
Configuration. The machine is configured with a single login node (m.cs.ucsb.edu), seven server nodes, and 56 diskless clients. The machine meiko.cs.ucsb.edu is not actually the Meiko itself, but a SPARCstation 10 fileserver. The bulk of the disk space available on the Meiko resides here, and this is the site of user home directories. For performance and security reasons, CS home directories are not mounted on the Meiko CS-2. However on the fileserver, both standard home directories and Meiko home directories are available.
The Meiko home directories are in /fs/meiko-user, and are also available on the CS-2. Meiko system files are in /fs/meiko-sys.
Meiko CS-2 configuration: Client nodes named m000-m055. Server nodes named m096, m100, m104, ..., m120
The Meiko CS-2 principal login node is called m.cs.ucsb.edu (m124) Current client partitions: servers, p32, p16, p4 p2a p2b.
To see the status of the partitions, run the command 'rinfo' on the Meiko login node.
Disk configuration. m124 node contains shared system files (/opt) and a user accessible partition (/export/tmphome). /export/tmphome IS NOT BACKED UP. It may be cleared at anytime. Server nodes contain root/swap/usr for self and 8 clients. Server nodes also contain a 7x122MB parallel file system partition.
The /usr/compsci file system is mounted on m124. This file system contains the standard CS binaries, including X11 and GNU applications.
Documentation Investigate directories in /opt/MEIKOcs2 for postscript documentation, application examples, include files, libraries, parallel packages, etc. Investigate directories in /opt/MEIKOcs2 for postscript documentation. Also check /fs/meiko-sys on fileserver. SPARC compiler docs in /opt/SUNWspro. Meiko answerbook in /opt/Mkab001. The answerbook is intended to be used under OpenWindows, which supports some additional features over standard X11. However you can also read the postscript files with ghostview (/usr/compsci/X11/bin/gv).