The Facility of StarBED

Overview

Thru twice major equipments introducing, StarBED facility is updated. StarBED have 680 PC-nodes and several switches.

NICs of PC-node groups
group # of experiment networks disk installation
name PCs ATM FE* GbE** type date
A 208 0 0 1 ATA 2002
B 64 1 1 0 ATA
C 32 1 4 0 SCSI
D 144 0 1 0 ATA
E 64 0 4 0 ATA
F 168 0 0 4 SATA 2006
total 680          
*FE means FastEtherent, **GbE means Gigabit Ethernet
 

You can see photos of these equipments. Photo Tour


Since 2006

At 2006 April, we introduced a set of racks. The set consists with 168 PCs and 4 switches.

Basic Specifications

Group F
Model NEC Express5800/110Rg-1
Chipset Intel E7230
CPU Pentium4 3.2GHz; HT acceptable
Memory 2.0GB
Disk SATA 80GB x 2
Network (on-broad) double GigabitEthernet
INTEL PRO/1000 PM Server Adaptor x 2
(extend#1) double GigabitEthernet;
INTEL PRO/1000 MT Dual Port Server Adaptor
(extend#2) double GigabitEthernet
INTEL PRO/1000 MT Dual Port Server Adaptor
Size 19" rackmount 1U height


Since 2002

StarBED have 512 nodes. There are 2 kind of network for management and experiment. We can make experiment topologies on the experiment network with configuring VLAN or ATM VP/VC on switches.

Node

The total number of actual node is 512. And we can use more experiment nodes with VMware on these actual nodes. It is designed that 10 virtual nodes will run on one actual node. Therfore, it can build an experiment environment with up to about 5000 nodes.

Basic Specifications

  Group A,B,D,E Group C
Model NEC Express5800
110Rc-1 120Ra-1
Chipset ServerWorks LE
CPU Pentium3 1GHz
Memory 0.5GB
DiskIDE 30GB SCSI 36GB
Network (on-broad)2 FastEthernet
(extend) ATM and/or FastEthernet
Size 19" rackmount 1U height

In detail of network interface cards (NICs), see below section.

Network

There are two networks in StarBED, management and experiment. By separating the management network from the network dedicated to the experiments, we guarantee the traffic separation and the precision of the experiments.

NICs of node

Each node is connected to 2 networks, one is the experiment network and the other is management network. All node have 1 ethernet interface to management network, in the following table, it is showed network interfaces for the experiment network.

group the number experiment network disk
name of nodes ATM FE* GbE** type
A 208 0 0 1 IDE
B 64 1 1 0 IDE
C 32 1 4 0 SCSI
D 144 0 1 0 IDE
E 64 0 4 0 IDE
*FE means FastEtherent, **GbE means Gigabit Ethernet


StarBED project, 2006.