Tdgrocks - Hardware Setup

All components for the PC cluster were delivered on 20/2/2003 and stored in room SCT719 and SCT719A, HKBU.

First day for the rack installation, 17/3/2003. 3 sets of UPS were placed at the bottom of each rack.

At the end of the day, a lot of components were still waiting for installation.

Rails were installed inside each rack. Each pair of rails was responsible for holding a 2U server, which is a cluster node.

Cluster interconnect: Extreme BlackDiamond 6816 Gigabit ethernet switch.

Cluster interconnect was also installed in a Dell rack.

Another view of the racks, with the UPS successfully installed.

Cluster interconnect comes with 2 power supplies.

Cluster nodes were installed into each rack, according to the order of their serial numbers (asset tags) for easy management in the future.

16 servers (cluster nodes) and 3 sets of UPS filled up one rack.

At the end of the first day, all racks were moved to SCT713. HKBU. And they were REAL heavy.

One occupied rack in position.

6 racks filled up with cluster nodes were placed in position.

The 1U LCD monitor and keyboard were connected to the master node.

Started to lay network cables (CAT 6) from the servers in one of the racks on 23/3/03.

Each cluster node would be soon connected with ethernet switches (up: fast ethernet network for system management, down: gigabit ethernet network for computation), through the network cables.

There are altogether 128 pieces of network cables in the cluster.

A pair of network cables were plugged into the back of each server.

At the end of the fourth day (20/3/2003), all network cables were plugged into the gigabit and fast ethernet switch. See how neat they look!

When uncovering the front panel of each server, you will see a LCD display showing the basic hardware information.

For the ease of initial checking, a keyboard with built-in mouse (to the right side of the keyboard) and an external monitor were used to connect to the server through the VGA and keyboard ports in front of the chassis.