Quickstart

Hardware

Installing monitors on the stands

Requirements for a single team:

• two ladders,
• 2 10mm wrenches,
• 17mm wrench,
• 2 4mm or 5mm (!!!need to check!!!) hex key or torx,
• phillips screwdriver,
• 3 people.

Overall requirements:

• 5 people

Setup is simple and can be parallelised up to four teams, because there are four seperate stands. 5 people are required to put higher part of a stand on top of lower part. It is important to put shelves on the pillars of lower and upper parts before inserting the upper part on top of lower part.

Connecting power and DVI cables to each monitor

Requirements for a single team:

• proper DVI cables,
• proper power cables,
• ladder,
• 1 person.

Each monitor has its unique id, which consists of two numbers - first is on X axis, second on Y axis. X axis values increase from left to right and Y axis values increase from bottom to top (as in first quarter of Cartesian coordinate system). Both of them range from 0 to 7. Each DVI and power cable is labeled on both ends with monitor id it should be connected to, therefore before connecting a cable it should be checked whether the cable belongs to specified monitor. When both cables are connected they should be lead through holes in each shelf. Power cables can be plugged to an empty power socket on the stand base immediately.

Again, this job can be parallelised to four or even more teams.

Connecting DVI cables to GPUs

Requirements:

• connection diagram,
• proper DVI to DP adapters,
• DP to miniDP adapters,
• 1 person.

Each monitor needs to be connected to the specific GPU port (according to connection diagram) using proper adapter. Adapters can be passive or active. Each GPU can have 4 active and 2 passive adapters connected (6 miniDP cards) or 4 active adapters (4 DP and 2 DVI cards). Passive adapters in 6 miniDP cards need to be connected to first two ports counting from Motherboard (DFP-6 and DFP-5).

This job can be parallelised according to the number of computers.

Software

System installation

Currently used operating system on tile machines is Ubuntu Linux 10.04 LTS due to problems with fibre network cards on newer versions. Installation of the system is normal, Ubuntu installation.

Network setup

Each tile computer should have specific address tied to network interface it uses to connect with access machine. Currently, addresses from 192.168.80.0/24 network are used. First address (192.168.80.1) is used by access machine. Tile computers have addresses in form 192.168.80.{10+tile_number}, where tile_number starts from 0. Addresses can be assigned staticly using /etc/network/interfaces file. Each tile computer should also have the hostname set to SAGE-tile{tile_number} and access computer to SAGE-access for easier access. As there is no DNS server running, hostnames should be assigned to IPs using /etc/hosts file on each machine.

Xorg setup

Each GPU needs to run a seperate Xorg Screen containing 6 monitors. Sample xorg.conf file can be found in the repository.

Environment configuration

See:

• SAGE
• Equalizer