A Beowulf cluster is a computer cluster of what are normally identical, commodity-grade computers networked into a small

local area network A local area network (LAN) is a computer network that interconnects computers within a limited area such as a residence, school, laboratory, university campus or office building. By contrast, a wide area network (WAN) not only covers a larger ...

with libraries and programs installed which allow processing to be shared among them. The result is a high-performance parallel computing cluster from inexpensive

personal computer A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or tec ...

hardware. The name ''Beowulf'' originally referred to a specific computer built in 1994 by Thomas Sterling and Donald Becker at

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil List of government space agencies, space program ...

. The name "Beowulf" comes from the

Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th c ...

epic poem of the same name. No particular piece of software defines a cluster as a Beowulf. Typically only

free and open source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

is used, both to save cost and to allow customisation. Most Beowulf clusters run a

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X or *nix) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-li ...

operating system, such as BSD,

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

, or Solaris. Commonly used parallel processing libraries include Message Passing Interface (MPI) and

Parallel Virtual Machine Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) is a software tool for parallel networking of computers. It is designed to allow a network of heterogeneous Unix and/or Windows machines to be used as a single distributed parallel processor. Thus large computatio ...

(PVM). Both of these permit the programmer to divide a task among a group of networked computers, and collect the results of processing. Examples of MPI software include

Open MPI Open MPI is a Message Passing Interface (MPI) library project combining technologies and resources from several other projects (FT-MPI, LA-MPI, LAM/MPI, and PACX-MPI). It is used by many TOP500 supercomputers including Roadrunner, which was ...

or MPICH. There are additional MPI implementations available. Beowulf systems operate worldwide, chiefly in support of

scientific computing Computational science, also known as scientific computing or scientific computation (SC), is a field in mathematics that uses advanced computing capabilities to understand and solve complex problems. It is an area of science that spans many disc ...

. Since 2017, every system on the

Top500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non- distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coinci ...

list of the world's fastest supercomputers has used Beowulf software methods and a

operating system. At this level, however, most are by no means just assemblages of commodity hardware; custom design work is often required for the nodes (often blade servers), the networking and the cooling systems.

Development

A description of the Beowulf cluster, from the original "how-to", which was published by Jacek Radajewski and Douglas Eadline under the

Linux Documentation Project The Linux Documentation Project (LDP) is a dormant an all-volunteer project that maintains a large collection of GNU and Linux-related documentation and publishes the collection online. It began as a way for hackers to share their documentation wi ...

in 1998:

Operating systems

a number of Linux distributions, and at least one BSD, are designed for building Beowulf clusters. These include: * MOSIX, geared toward computationally intensive, IO-low applications * ClusterKnoppix, based on Knoppix *

Kerrighed Kerrighed is an open source single-system image (SSI) cluster software project. The project started in October 1998 at the Paris research group The French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control. From 2006 to 2011, the pro ...

Rocks Cluster Distribution Rocks Cluster Distribution (originally NPACI Rocks) is a Linux distribution intended for high-performance computing (HPC) clusters. It was started by National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure and the San Diego Supercompute ...

DragonFly BSD DragonFly BSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system forked from FreeBSD 4.8. Matthew Dillon, an Amiga developer in the late 1980s and early 1990s and FreeBSD developer between 1994 and 2003, began working on DragonFly BSD in ...

* Quantian, a

live DVD A live CD (also live DVD, live disc, or live operating system) is a complete bootable computer installation including operating system which runs directly from a CD-ROM or similar storage device into a computer's memory, rather than loading fr ...

with scientific applications, based on Knoppix and ClusterKnoppix * Kentucky Linux Athlon Testbed *

PelicanHPC PelicanHPC is an operating system based on Debian Live, which provides a rapid means of setting up a high performance computer cluster. PelicanHPC was formerly known as ParallelKNOPPIX. Versions References External links * Opera ...

, based on

Debian Live Debian (), also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software, developed by the community-supported Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. The first version of Deb ...

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 using all CPUs and

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch * ...

in the cluster. A Beowulf cluster is scalable to a nearly unlimited number of computers, limited only by the overhead of the network. Provisioning of operating systems and other software for a Beowulf Cluster can be automated using software, such as Open Source Cluster Application Resources. OSCAR installs on top of a standard installation of a supported Linux distribution on a cluster's head node.

References

Bibliography

* ''Beowulf Cluster Computing With Windows'' by Thomas Lawrence Sterling 2001 MIT Press * ''Beowulf Cluster Computing With Linux'' by Thomas Lawrence Sterling 2001 MIT Press

External links

The Beowulf Cluster Site
*
A detailed description of building a Beowulf cluster
{{Authority control Cluster computing Parallel computing Job scheduling NASA spin-off technologies Unix software

Development

Operating systems

See also

References

Bibliography

External links