| | | | | | Beowulf was the legendary sixth-century hero from a distant realm who freed the Danes of Heorot by destroying the oppressive monster Grendel. As a metaphor, "Beowulf" has been applied to a new strategy in high performance computing that exploits mass-market technologies to overcome the oppressive costs in time and money of supercomputing, thus freeing scientists, engineers, and others to devote themselves to their respective disciplines. Beowulf, both in myth and reality, challenges and conquers a dominant obstacle, in their respective domains, thus opening the way to future achievement. | | | | | | | | | You are about to engage in an experience that only a few years ago would have been impossible. You are going to learn how to build and use a supercomputer. And you are going to find out how to do so quickly, at low cost, and with facilities readily available to most small academic or industrial groups. In short, you are about to enter the world of what Science magazine has called "Do-it-yourself Supercomputing" or what much of the high performance computing community refers to as "Beowulf PC Clusters," "Beowulf-class Systems," or simply "Beowulfs." | | | | | | | | | A Beowulf-class system is a cluster of mass-market commodity off the shelf (M2COTS) PCs interconnected by low cost local area network (LAN) technology running an open source code Unix-like operating system and executing parallel applications programmed with an industry standard message passing model and library. Today, Beowulf-class systems are installed and operational at sites all over the world. These systems range from a few nodes with sustained performance of hundreds of Megaflops to more than a hundred nodes achieving tens of Gigaflops. The most powerful of these systems are among the top 500 list of the highest performance computers in the world. Beowulfs can be found in universities, national laboratories, industrial groups, government installations, undergraduate dormitories, and small entrepreneurial start-up companies. They are even beginning to show up in mainstream commercial and business concerns. Beowulfs are applied to a wide range of applications and workloads. Many of the computing problems performed using Beowulfs have come from the domains of science and engineering, the primary users of supercomputers and massively parallel processors (MPPs). But other problems have involved data-oriented computations for databases, information archiving and retrieval, and education. Beowulfs are used in many academic laboratories as test beds for teaching concepts in parallel computer systems, software, measurement, and application. They are also used as development platforms for application codes that are eventually migrated to bigger MPPs. | | | | | | | | | Beowulf-class computers are simply the best price/performance systems available today for many high end applications. This cost advantage often can be as | | | | |
