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Concept
Beowulf cluster
Summary
A Beowulf cluster is a computer cluster of what are normally identical, commodity-grade computers networked into a small local area network 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 hardware.
The name Beowulf originally referred to a specific computer built in 1994 by Thomas Sterling and Donald Becker at NASA. The name "Beowulf" comes from the Old English epic poem of the same name.
No particular piece of software defines a cluster as a Beowulf. Typically only free and open source software is used, both to save cost and to allow customization. Most Beowulf clusters run a Unix-like operating system, such as BSD, Linux, or Solaris. Commonly used parallel processing libraries include Message Passing Interface (MPI) and Parallel Virtual Machine (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 or MPICH. There are additional MPI implementations available.
Beowulf systems operate worldwide, chiefly in support of scientific computing. Since 2017, every system on the Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers has used Beowulf software methods and a Linux 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.
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 in 1998:
Beowulf is a multi-computer architecture which can be used for parallel computations. It is a system which usually consists of one server node, and one or more client nodes connected via Ethernet or some other network. It is a system built using commodity hardware components, like any PC capable of running a Unix-like operating system, with standard Ethernet adapters, and switches.
Official source
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