What is a Beowulf

Here's one of many possible definitions:

A Beowulf system is a collection of personal computers constructed from commodity-off-the-shelf hardware components interconnected with a system-area-network and configured to operate as a single unit, parallel computing platform, using an open-source network operating system.

A Beowulf is dedicated parallel cluster as opposed to a Network of Workstations (NOW) or Cluster of Workstations (COW). A Beowulf is more like a Pile Of PC's (POP)

The driving design philosophy of a Beowulf system is to achieve the best possible price/performance ratio for a given computing problem. For many problems it's possible to achieve an order of magnitude improvement in price/performance compared with "conventional" parallel supercomputer designs.

Currently the two most common system designs are;

• Intel PII/III based PC's with switched fast ethernet running Linux
• High performance Alpha processor based PC's with Myrinet (a high speed low latency network system) running Linux

There are numerous other possibilities. Almost any hardware can be used, there is even talk about using Sony-PlayStation2's running Linux to build Beowulfs! The new AMD Athlon and soon to be released Intel Merced offer other high performance posibilites. Other networking technology such as ATM and GigaBit ethernet can be used. Most anything is fair game. However, the most common, and thus the most well understood, systems are Intel or Alpha + fast ethernet or Myrinet.

For the network operating system Linux is by far the most popular for Beowulfs and it's largely the combination of the free availability of the Linux source code coupled with low cost high performance PC components that has spawned the Beowulf movement. FreeBSD would also a good choice. Also, people have used commercial operating systems such as Sun Solaris and Microsoft Windows NT. However, the strongest support and most rapid development is happening in the Linux community. Any Linux distribution can be used, the most popular are RedHat, Debian and SuSE, with RedHat being the most popular. [I use Mandrake which is based on RedHat but optimized for Pentium systems and updated more frequently]

Some good links to find more information are:

• The original Beowulf web site at NASA Among the many things you will find here are information about joining the Beowulf mailing list, The mailing list FAQ, and the list archives
• There is a useful book with lots of good information titled, How to Build a Beowulf, A Guide to the Implementation and Application of PC Clusters
• The Beowulf Documentation Project at The Beowulf Underground

• How To Build it
• How To Use it
• What Chemists are doing with their Clusters