Beowulf (computing)

Beowulf is a design for high-performance Parallel Computing Clusters on inexpensive Personal Computer hardware. Originally developed by Donald Becker at NASA , Beowulf systems are now deployed worldwide, chiefly in support of Scientific Computing .

A ''Beowulf cluster'' is a group of usually identical PC computers running a FOSS Unix-like operating system, such as Linux or BSD . They are networked into a small TCP/IP LAN , and have libraries and programs installed which allow processing to be shared among them.

There is no particular piece of software that defines a cluster as a Beowulf. Commonly used parallel processing libraries include MPI ( Message Passing Interface ) and PVM ( Parallel Virtual Machine ). Both of these permit the programmer to divide a task among a group of networked computers, and recollect the results of processing.

The name comes from the legend of Beowulf .

OPERATING SYSTEMS

Presently, there are a number of different Linux Distributions that are designed for building Beowulf clusters. These include:

ClusterKnoppix (based on Knoppix )

(geared towards multimedia production)

Rocks Linux

Oscar

Scyld

Clustermatic

A cluster can be set up by using Knoppix bootable CDs in combination with OpenMosix . The computers will automatically link together, without need for complex configurations, to form a Beowulf cluster utilizing all CPUs and RAM in the cluster. This type of system is scalable to a nearly unlimited number of computers.

EXAMPLES

Kentucky Linux Athlon Testbed (KLAT2)

Stone Soupercomputer

Carnegie Mellon University, Process Systems Engineering Beowulf Cluster

Southampton University, Information Systems Services, Iridis Beowulf Cluster

Asgard - Beowulf Computing at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology

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Beowulf (computing)

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