ALADDIN-G5K

The PARIS project has been selected by the French Ministry of Research (ACI GRID) to be one of the 8 nodes of the Grid'5000 computing infrastruture. This project, funded by the ACI GRID, aims at building an experimental Grid platform gathering 8 sites geographically distributed in France combining up to 5000 processors. The current plans are to assemble a physical platform featuring 8 clusters, each with 100 to a thousand PCs, connected by the Renater Education and Research Network. All clusters will be connected to Renater at 1 Gb/s (10 Gb/s is expected in near future). This high collaborative research effort is funded by the French ministry of Education and Research, INRIA, CNRS, the Universities of all sites and several regional councils. This initiative is governed by a steering committee, headed by Dr. Franck Cappello, and a technical committee gathering several engineers in all Grid’5000 sites.

The main objective of the project is to provide the community of Grid researchers in France with an experimental platform for their research, fully configurable for each experiment. The scope of the experiment that could be conducted on Grid’5000 covers all the software stack layers between the user and the Grid hardware (clusters and networks). Typically a Grid researcher will be able to configure the platform with its favourite network protocols, OS kernel and distribution, middleware, runtimes and applications and run experiments on this setting. Grid’5000 will also provide a set of software tools to allow easy experiment preparation, run and control, and fast experiment turn around.
The experiments currently envisioned by the Grid’5000 participants concern: high speed network protocol design and evaluation, operating system adaptation and improvement in the perspective of a single system image for Grids, adding sandboxing and virtualisation in OS for the Grid, testing the benefit of object oriented middleware for application coupling, evaluating a large variety of fault tolerance techniques at the runtime level, testing application gridification, evaluating novel algorithms for High Performance Computing on the Grid.

To learn more about Grid'5000: http://www.grid5000.fr

The PARIS project has been awarded twice (Grid'5000 call1 in 2003 and call2 in 2004) by the ACI GRID getting two grants. One for the Cluster itself and another one for the System Area Network to link nodes together using advance networking technologies. The Britanny Regional Council gave us two grants. One of the grant allowed us to hire an enginneer to manage the installation of the cluster and to perform the administration. The second grant will provide funding support for acquiring the networking technologies. Moreover we had a strong support from IRISA partners: INRIA gave us a Research Engineer to provide high-level support to users who will perform experiments using Grid'5000 and the University of Rennes 1 will give us an engineer for the administration and advanced experiments using the cluster.

Our objective was to build a 512 processors heterogeneous cluster before end of 2005.

In 2007, we have the following configuration:

• 66 processors DELL PC cluster (33 1U PC equiped with two Intel dual cores)
  
• 132 processors DELL PC cluster (66 1U PC equiped with two Intel dual cores).
• 132 processors SUN PC cluster (66 1U PC equiped with two AMD Opteron)
• 198 processors HP PC cluster (99 1U PC equiped with two AMD Opteron)
  

Since September 2007, our cluster provides 726 cores in 528 processors to the Grid'5000 users community.

Our computer room (October 2007)

Our network overview