Tina: Technical Notes

Here are some technical specifications of TINA:

Basic Concept

Tina is a self-made parallel computer based on the beowulf concept. What does "beowulf" mean? This is the description which can be found in the Beowulf FAQ:

It's a kind of high-performance massively parallel computer built primarily out of commodity hardware components, running a free-software operating system like Linux or FreeBSD, interconnected by a private high-speed network. It consists of a cluster of PCs or workstations dedicated to running high-performance computing tasks. The nodes in the cluster don't sit on people's desks; they are dedicated to running cluster jobs. It is usually connected to the outside world through only a single node.

Tina has 3 basic components

two separate Ethernets
the computing farm
system server

Two separate Ethernets

We have two separate Ethernets, each has a ENTERASYS Matrix E5 switch. Why two? Our nodes don't have a local hard-disk, so booting and disk access will work over NFS. So we divided the load, one network for communication and one for system services like NFS etc.

Computing farm

64 Dual XEON nodes (all diskless).

Each XEON-node consists of

dual-processor board Supermicro X5DPA-GG
two Intel XEON 3 GHz CPUs
2 GByte RAM (DDR-266)

System server

This Server provides different services (filesystems, boot-images etc.) for the nodes.

dual-processor board Gigabyte GA-6VXD7 ATX with 2*PIII/800Mhz
2 GByte RAM (SDRAM/133)
3COM 100Mbit Ethernet card (uplink to campus network)
3COM 1000Mbit Ethernet cards (uplink to system network)
3COM 100Mbit Ethernet card (redundant link to communication network)
SATA hard-discs, total 250GB

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Sunday, January 11th 2026, 12:21:31 CET