Home Company Company Blog Hardware testing  Hardware testing
Tuesday, 05 August 2008 13:09  Failed hardware can demote a
productive cluster to a piece of data center decoration. At
Advanced Clustering, we take many steps to ensure that all
hardware (computers, switches, consoles) arrive in working
order.  Upon the completion of assembly, each computer is
verified to power on. Once powered on, each machine is
programmatically checked to contain the correct hardware
including CPUs, RAM, hard drives, and add-in cards. Breakin, our
stress-test tool, is then started on each system. Each computer
will run Breakin for 24 to 48 hours. During this time we see the
largest number of component failures. Breakin's verbose display
allows our technicians to track down the offending
hardware quickly.  After surviving Breakin, the computers have
their OS installed and are integrated in to their cluster. At
this point we run the machines as a cluster. First, we check the
network performance or each network with Intel MPI Bench