Beowulf (computing)

Beowulf is a design for high-performance parallel computing computer cluster 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 local area network, 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 (character).

=Operating Systems=

Presently, there are a number of different Linux distribution that are designed for building Beowulf clusters. These include: *ClusterKnoppix (based on Knoppix)

(geared towards multimedia production)

*Rocks Linux *Oscar (Linux distribution) *Scyld (Linux distribution) *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 *[http://beowulf.cheme.cmu.edu/ Carnegie Mellon University, Process Systems Engineering Beowulf Cluster] * - Home computers networked to find Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. * - Home computers networked to compute protein folding.

= Other software solutions =

*[http://www.clusterresources.com/products/maui/ Maui Cluster Scheduler]-open source *[http://www.clusterresources.com/products/torque/ TORQUE Resource Manager]-open source *[http://www.clusterresources.com/products/moabclustersuite.shtml Moab Cluster Suite]-commercial *[http://www.clusterresources.com/products/moabgridsuite.shtml Moab Grid Suite]-commercial

=See also=

*APE4NOW

Computer cluster

Grid computing

Cluster Resources, Inc.

=External links=

*[http://www.linuxhpc.org/ LinuxHPC.org] *[http://www.beowulf.org/ Beowulf.org] *[http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/ MPI homepage] *[http://aggregate.org/KLAT2/ KLAT2] *[http://www.clusterbuilder.org Cluster Builder] *[http://www.clusterresources.com Cluster Resources]