Distributed ASCI Supercomputer 2 (DAS-2)

A 200-node wide-area distributed system built out of five Myrinet-based Dual Pentium-III clusters

DAS-2 (Distributed ASCI Supercomputer) is a wide-area distributed cluster designed by the Advanced School for Computing and Imaging (ASCI). The DAS-2 machine is used for research on parallel and distributed computing by five Dutch universities:

• Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam
• Leiden University,
• University of Amsterdam (UvA)
• Delft University of Technology,
• University of Utrecht

DAS-2 consists of five clusters, located at the five universities. The cluster at the Vrije Universiteit contains 72 nodes, the other four clusters have 32 nodes (200 nodes with 400 CPUs in total). The system was built by IBM. The operating system the DAS-2 runs is RedHat Linux.

The DAS-2 system is funded by NWO (the Netherlands organization for scientific research) and the participating universities.

Technical description

• Two 1-Ghz Pentium-IIIs
• at least 1 GB RAM (1.5 GB for the nodes in Leiden and UvA, and 2 GB for two "large" nodes at the VU)
• A 20 GByte local IDE disk (80 GB for Leiden and UvA)
• A Myrinet interface card
• A Fast Ethernet interface (on-board)

The nodes within a local cluster are connected by a Myrinet-2000 network, which is used as high-speed interconnect, mapped into user-space. In addition, Fast Ethernet is used as OS network (file transport). The five local clusters are connected by the Dutch university Internet backbone.