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Beowulf is a design for high-performance parallel computing clusters on inexpensive personal computer hardware. Originally developed by 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 FreeBSD or another open source Unix operating system, such as Linux or OpenBSD. 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.
The name comes from the legend of Beowulf.
A very interesting development is linux/knoppix bootable CDs in combination with openMosix, without any settings required any number of computers in a network booting like this will automatically melt together to form a cluster or Beowulf and be ready for use adding all CPUs and RAM together.
Presently, there are a number of different Linux distributions that are designed for building Beowulf clusters. These include:
Examples
See also
- Automatic Parallelization Environment for Network of Workstations
External links
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