Beowulf Cluster

Beowulf is a design for high-performance parallel computing clusters on inexpensive personal computer hardware. Originally developed by Thomas L. Sterling and 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 Free and Open Source Software (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. It is a common misconception that any software will run faster on a Beowulf. The software must be re-written to take advantage of the cluster, and specifically have multiple non-dependent parallel computations involved in its execution.

The name comes from the main character in the Old English epic Beowulf.

References

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