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 an open source 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.

A very interesting development is the use of linux/knoppix bootable CDs in combination with openMosix. A cluster can be implemented without any settings required. It is scalable to any number of computers in a network. Booting the computers like this will automatically link them together to form a Beowulf cluster and it will be ready for use adding all CPUs and RAM together.

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

• ClusterKnoppix (based on Knoppix)
• dyne:bolic (geared towards multimedia production)
• Rocks Linux
• Oscar
• Scyld
• Clustermatic

Examples

• Kentucky Linux Athlon Testbed (KLAT2}
• Stone Soupercomputer

See also

• Automatic Parallelization Environment for Network of Workstations

External links

• LinuxHPC.org
• Beowulf.org
• MPI homepage
• KLAT2