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 a FOSS 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 main character in the Old English epic Beowulf.

Operating systems

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

• ClusterKnoppix (based on Knoppix)
• bolic (geared towards multimedia production)
• ROCK Linux
• Scyld

Also available is DragonFly BSD

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

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• Kentucky Linux Athlon Testbed (KLAT2)
• Stone Soupercomputer
• Carnegie Mellon University, Process Systems Engineering Beowulf Cluster
• Southampton University, Information Systems Services, Iridis Beowulf Cluster
• Asgard - Beowulf Computing at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology

Other software solutions

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• Maui Cluster Scheduler-open source
• TORQUE Resource Manager-open source
• Moab Cluster Suite-commercial
• Moab Grid Suite-commercial
• Sun Grid Engine

See also

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• Computer cluster
• Grid computing
• Platform Computing

External links

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• LinuxHPC.org
• Beowulf.org
• MPI homepage
• KLAT2
• Cluster Builder
• NPACI Rocks
• Engineering a Beowulf-style Compute Cluster

Parallel computing | Linux

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