ICubBrain

Front and rear view of iCubBrain rack.

iCubBrain is a cluster of 2 machines used by VisLab to run the computation behind stable robot 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

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 to configure the left part of the server, called icubbrain1. The settings for icubbrain2 will be just about the same, with the last octet of the IP address being 42 instead of 41. In general, we follow the guidelines at VisLab machines configuration.

Boot

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

Sometimes, you have 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 plug an Ethernet cable into the first one (which turns on the "1" led in the chassis front). Then, when Ubuntu asks to choose between eth0 and eth1, we pick up eth0.

Network configuration

• manually configure 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

Additional software

In general, keep following the guidelines at VisLab machines configuration. Below are the exceptions.

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 yarp configuration

 CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE Release
 CREATE_LIB_MATH

 CREATE_OPTIONAL_CARRIERS
 ENABLE_yarpcar_bayer_carrier

• 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

1. yarp namespace /icub
2. in order to find the yarpserver running on chico3, write 10.10.1.53 10000 into the file specified by yarp conf