Beowulf (computing)
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Beowulf-cluster-the-borg.jpg
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 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
Beowulf.jpg
Carnegie Mellon University, Process Systems Engineering Beowulf Cluster (http://beowulf.cheme.cmu.edu/)
See also
External links
- LinuxHPC.org (http://www.linuxhpc.org/)
- Beowulf.org (http://www.beowulf.org/)
- MPI homepage (http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/)
- KLAT2 (http://aggregate.org/KLAT2/)da:Beowulf-klyngesystemer