theUSE of theHIVE

The User View of the Architecture

theHIVE consists of three types of nodes, the queen, the drones, and the bees. The queen (queen0 or q0) is the administrative node. It maintains consistency of software across all the bees and the drones and is the global system software file server for the bees. Only the system administrator(s) has an account on the queen. The drones (usrhive, drone0, or d0) are the user interface to theHIVE. There may be more than one drone, such as graphic work stations, remote sensing satellite antena servers, files servers or other application specific servers. The bees ( bee000-bee063 or b0-b63) are the parallel compute server of theHIVE. The bees are all identical in both hardware and system software. Thus one logs on to a drone where one does all ones software development and then submit the resultant program to the bees to execute

theHIVE is intended to be used in an SPMD (single program/multiple data) fashion. Every node (drones and bees) has a complete LINUX system installed on it. Program development software is only installed on the drones, but all runtime libraries are installed on both the bees and the drones.

Although theHIVE is intended to be an SPMD architecture, there are no restrictions on the user to use theHIVE in a more general MIMD fashion. A user may use "rsh", "rcp", or "rlogin" to gain access to any node from any other node and utilize any LINUX command.

User Accounts

A user will be given an account on one drone. He will also have an account on every bee. From his drone account he may log in to any bee using rlogin. A user has dummy pass word on the bees. Therefore his .rhost file contains the names of the other nodes from which he may login (i.e. all the bees and the drone that has his external login account). The command "telnet" may not be used to login to a bee. Bees may not be logged into from outside theHIVE.

The Filesystem

There is a /home directory on every bee and drone; they are cross mounted on each other under the directory /homes. For example, /home on bee047 is the same directory as /homes/bee047 and that directory will be found on every other bee and drone as /homes/bee047. Every user account will have a directory with the same name as the account under every /home directory. For instance, account freznel will have the directory /home/freznel on every node. When he logs in to a node, the command "pwd" will show that he is in the directory '/home/freznel'.

The Commands

Since theHIVE is intended to be used in a SPMD fashion, it has six SPMD parallel 'rcommands'. The parallel 'rsh' commands are Ssh, Psh, and Hsh and the parallel 'rcp' commands are Scp, Pcp, and Hcp.

• Ssh <command> - performs an "rsh <bee###> <command>" for every bee in theHIVE. Each "rsh" waits until the previous "rsh" to complete before it starts. With the default order of the rsh's being first to perform on lower numbered bees before proceeding to higher numbered bees. The default order is defined in "/bin/hive".
• Psh <command> - performs an "rsh <bee###> <command>" for every bee in theHIVE. All "rsh" commands are started at the same time, but the output from the commands are in the same order as if an "Ssh" command had been performed
• Hsh <command> - performs an "rsh <bee###> <command>" for every bee in theHIVE. The "rsh" commands are submited in a hierarchical fashion. Each parent bee completes its "rsh" command before its children bees are permitted to begin their "rsh" commands. The default hierarchy is defined in "/bin/hive".

• Scp <sfile> <dfile> - performs an "rcp <sfile> <bee###> :<dfile>" for every bee in theHIVE. Each "rcp" waits until the previous "rcp" to complete before it starts. With the default order of the rcp's being first to perform on lower numbered bees before proceeding to higher numbered bees. The default order is defined in "/bin/hive".
• Pcp <sfile> <dfile> - performs an "rcp <sfile> <bee###> :<dfile>" for every bee in theHIVE. All "rcp" commands are started at the same time, but the output from the commands are in the same order as if an "Scp" command had been performed
• Hcp <drone file> <bee directory> - performs an "rcp <drone file> <bee###>:<bee directory> " for every bee in theHIVE. The "rcp" command are submited in a hierarchical fashion. Each parent bee completes its "rcp" command before its children bees are permitted to begin their "rcp" commands. The default hierarchy is defined in "/bin/hive".

These commands facilitate the SPMD view of theHIVE. A user can make a directory with the same name on every bee with the command "Ssh mkdir myproject". For user "freznel" this will create the directory "/home/freznel/myproject" on every bee. To copy an executable to every bee one might use the command "Hcp a.out myproject" and execute it on every bee with "Psh myproject/a.out". In this fashion, the bee can be easily controlled with simple commands.

A tar file of these commands can be retrieved by clicking, thehive.commands.tar.

Note: To copy an 8Mbyte file to 64 nodes, Scp took 15 minutes, Pcp took 5 minutes and Hcp took 56 seconds.

Viewing the status of theHIVE

theHIVE has a few commands that allow the user to view its status. The simplest is Hroll while syspic is a Xwindows display of bee activity

• Hroll - does a roll call of all the bees. Each bee will sequentially reply with its name, starting with bee000 and ending with bee063.
• syspic - If the user is logged in from an Xwindows terminal, this will display a window of 64 bars indicating the cpu usage of each bee.

Preferred method of using PVM and MPI on theHIVE

Alternate method of Using PVM and MPI on theHIVE

Using aCe