How to Build a Beowulf has the principal objective of enabling, facilitating, and accelerating the adoption of the Beowulf model of distributed computing for real-world applications. Beowulfs use commodity hardware components and open source software components to deliver supercomputer levels of performance at an astonishingly low price. This book is targeted to a diverse readership and is intended to serve in multiple roles. It can be used by small groups to quickly bring up such systems for direct application. It can be used by college laboratories as a basis for practical courses in parallel computing systems. And it can be used by potential future users of Beowulf systems to evaluate their needs against the strengths and weaknesses of the approach. Finally, it can be used by the general technical reader to gain an overview of an important and rapidly growing field of parallel and high performance computing.
A book of this nature is challenged by the success its subject matter. How to Build a Beowulf concerns a topic that is undergoing rapid advancement. Many of the technologies on which Beowulf-class systems depend are experiencing such growth that hard data cannot help but become progressively out of date. On one hand, Beowulf, the book, provides specific information about devices and components available at the time of writing. On the other hand, it also places that information in a technological context that transcends a single generation of components. Where the technological trends are clear, the book also has information about systems that will soon be available. Much of the power of Beowulf is generation independent. It is safe to say that there will always be one or more mass-market microprocessors and operating systems to run on them, and that there will always be one or more commercial networks with which they can be integrated. As long as those predictions remain true, the ideas in this book will continue to be useful.
In crafting How to Build a Beowulf, we have had to cope with the enormous quantity of relevant material. At each level in the system structure of a Beowulf
