ICubBrain

Front and rear view of iCubBrain rack.

iCubBrain is a cluster of 2 machines used by VisLab to run stable demos (the other cluster, Cortex, is used for development).

Old information can be consulted at iCubBrain server configuration/Archive.

Specifications

We purchased iCubBrain from Tetragon in June 2009. The box includes a SC808T-980 1U chassis (1U Twin size) with two twin X7DWT serverboards. Each of the two boards hosts an Intel Xeon 8-core processor (8 x E5405 @ 2.00 GHz). Each machine is an independent computer, having two hard disk drive drawers and its own power and reset buttons.

Memory: 4GB for each machine (sudo dmidecode --type 17 to see RAM speed and type).

For full system specifications, go here (PDF) or on the entry on tsunami.pt

Current setup

machine	location	operating system	notes
icubbrain1	left half of chassis	Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 64bit	administrator account: vislab; demo account: icub
icubbrain2	right half of chassis	Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 64bit	administrator account: vislab; demo account: icub

Operating system installation

Next, we will explain how we configured the left part of the server, called icubbrain1. The settings for icubbrain2 will be just about the same (unless otherwise noted, see above table), with the last octet of the IP address being 42 instead of 41.

Boot

We booted the Ubuntu Server CD from an external USB CD drive. Press the 'Del' key if you need to access the BIOS boot order.

We then had to manually confirm the usage of a 'cdrom' module within the installation (following all the default selections).

Network interface

icubbrain1 has two Gbit interfaces. First we plugged an Ethernet cable into the first one (which turns on the "1" led in the chassis front). Then, when Ubuntu asked us to choose between eth0 and eth1, we picked up eth0.

Partitions

We chose the 'Guided - use entire disk' option, which yielded the following:

Hard disk partitioning

size	mountpoint	filesystem
133GB	/	ext3
5GB		swap

Operations after first boot

• choose Main server (rather than Portugal server, which is not always reliable) as the software repository. We do this by removing all the "pt." strings from /etc/apt/sources.list with the following command: sudo sed -i 's/pt.//g' sources.list
• sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get upgrade
• add icub user if not done already: sudo adduser icub followed by sudo usermod -aG admin icub to give it sudo privileges

Other operations performed

Network configuration

• manually configured the internet connection (/etc/network/interfaces):

  auto lo
  iface lo inet loopback
  
  auto eth0
  iface eth0 inet static
  address 10.10.1.41
  netmask 255.255.255.0
  network 10.10.1.0
  broadcast 10.10.1.255
  gateway 10.10.1.254

• optionally, we can customize the /etc/hosts file like we did on Chico3; this would allow us to quickly access other machines, as in: ping cortex1. Alternatively, we can do nothing and just use ping cortex1.visnet (i.e., attach the .visnet part after a machine name, see VisLab network for details).

Additional packages and environment variables

• Install some required packages:

  sudo apt-get install gcc g++ make subversion ssh libace-dev libgsl0-dev libncurses5-dev gfortran

• YARP and iCub require CMake version >= 2.6: cmake cmake-curses-gui

• Create a file called ~/.bash_env (used by both interactive and non-interactive sessions, such as commands launched via yarprun from another machine) like this one:

 export YARP_ROOT=/home/icub/yarp2
 export YARP_DIR=$YARP_ROOT/build
 export ICUB_ROOT=/home/icub/iCub
 export ICUB_DIR=$ICUB_ROOT/main/build
 export PATH=$PATH:$YARP_DIR/bin:$ICUB_DIR/bin
 export ICUB_ROBOTNAME=iCubLisboa01
 export IPOPT_DIR=/home/icub/Ipopt-3.10.0
 source $YARP_ROOT/scripts/yarp_completion  

• Then, before the following line of /etc/bash.bashrc

  [ -z "$PS1" ] && return

add this:

  # per-user environment variables (non-interactive and interactive mode)
  source $HOME/.bash_env

Subversion

We have set the following parameter in /etc/subversion/config:

 store-passwords = no

This implies that SVN will ask you for your password every time you do a commit. (Don't worry about changing your personal ~/.subversion/config file: the parameter is not actually set there, so the global /etc setting is used.)

Additional software

OpenCV

 sudo apt-get install libcv-dev libhighgui-dev libcvaux-dev

YARP and iCub

Follow the instructions on the RobotCub software article. For compilation, do not use sudo make install but simply make (we have configured the PATH variable to find the latest compiled binaries, and we do not want two copies of the same thing on the system).

• Custom yarp2 configuration

 CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE Release
 CREATE_LIB_MATH

• Custom iCub configuration: first compile IPOPT according to the official RobotCub wiki guide (http://eris.liralab.it/wiki/Installing_IPOPT), then proceed to configuring the actual iCub repository:

 CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE Release
 ENABLE_icubmod_cartesiancontrollerclient ON
 ENABLE_icubmod_gazecontrollerclient ON

• iCub compilation

 make
 make install_applications

• Final configuration

  yarp namespace /icub