The Stone Soupercomputer was a Beowulf-style computer cluster built at the US

Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1943, the laboratory is sponsored by the United Sta ...

in the late 1990s. A group of lab employees including William W. Hargrove and Forrest M. Hoffman applied for a grant to build a cluster in 1996, but it was rejected. They decided to build a cluster anyway, using desktop

personal computer A personal computer, commonly referred to as PC or computer, is a computer designed for individual use. It is typically used for tasks such as Word processor, word processing, web browser, internet browsing, email, multimedia playback, and PC ...

s that had been discarded as being too slow. The name was derived from the story of

stone soup Stone Soup is a European Folklore, folk story in which hungry strangers convince the people of a town to each share a small amount of their food in order to make a meal. In varying traditions, the stone has been replaced with other common inedib ...

. The developers used freely available and

open source software Open-source software (OSS) is Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...

such as

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

operating system, the

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 computa ...

toolkit, and the

Message Passing Interface The Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a portable message-passing standard designed to function on parallel computing architectures. The MPI standard defines the syntax and semantics of library routines that are useful to a wide range of use ...

library. By early 1997 the first applications were running on the cluster. By May 2001 it had 133 nodes. They included

Intel 80486 The Intel 486, officially named i486 and also known as 80486, is a microprocessor introduced in 1989. It is a higher-performance follow-up to the i386, Intel 386. It represents the fourth generation of binary compatible CPUs following the Inte ...

and

Pentium Pentium is a series of x86 architecture-compatible microprocessors produced by Intel from 1993 to 2023. The Pentium (original), original Pentium was Intel's fifth generation processor, succeeding the i486; Pentium was Intel's flagship proce ...

-based machines as well as a few

DEC Alpha Alpha (original name Alpha AXP) is a 64-bit reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Alpha was designed to replace 32-bit VAX complex instruction set computers ( ...

workstations. Low-cost

Ethernet Ethernet ( ) is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

networking was used for interconnection instead of any special-purpose network. The cluster was the subject of an article in ''

Scientific American ''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it, with more than 150 Nobel Pri ...

'' magazine in 2001. Many applications were developed on this system that could then be deployed on other, faster clusters. The stone cluster was no longer in use by August 2003. This approach was used as a model for other educational cluster projects.

References

{{Reflist Parallel computing Oak Ridge National Laboratory