LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Beowulf (Parallel Computing): Beowulf Project
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Beowulf (Parallel Computing) also shows up in the Retriever categories:
Beowulf (Medieval) , and more.
Beowulf (Medieval) , and more.
The central concept of a Beowulf cluster is the use of commercial off-the-shelf computers to produce a cost-effective alternative to a traditional supercomputer. One project that took this to an extreme was the Stone Soupercomputer.
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The Beowulf Project grew from the first Beowulf machine, while the Beowulf community has grown from the NASA project. Like the Linux community, the Beowulf community is a loosely organized confederation of researchers and developers. Each organization has its own agenda and its own reasons for developing a particular component or aspect of the Beowulf system. As a result, Beowulf class cluster computers range from several node clusters to several hundred node clusters. Some systems have been built by computational scientists and are used in an operational setting. Others have been built as test-beds for system research, while others serve as inexpensive platforms to learn about parallel programming.
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The Beowulf-class parallel computing system will meet the computational requirements for these research projects in a very cost-effective manner by the use of commodity processors and open-source or off-the-shelf software. The total cost of the equipment, including software and hardware is $200,000 for the 3 year duration of the project, of which GeorgeMason University will supply a total of $100,000 and NSFcontributes $100,000. The science investigations conducted by principal investigators are summarized below. The system architecture, construction, benchmarking and operation are overseen by TarekEl-Ghazawi and Jearanai Vongsaard
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The world-wide “Beowulf project” was initiated in 1994 by two researchers at Goddard Space Flight Center who built a cluster computer out of 16 processors connected by Ethernet. This computer, which they called Beowulf, provided a parallel computing environment for solving problems with huge computing and storage requirements in a fraction of the time required to run on even the most powerful desktop computers, but at a fraction of the cost of a large parallel computer.
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In the taxonomy of parallel computers, Beowulf clusters fall somewhere between MPP (Massively Parallel Processors, like the nCube, CM5, Convex SPP, Cray T3D, Cray T3E, etc.) and NOWs (Networks of Workstations). The Beowulf project benefits from developments in both these architectures. MPPs are typically larger and have a lower latency interconnect network than a Beowulf cluster. Programmers are still required to worry about locality, load balancing, granularity, and communication overheads in order to obtain the best performance. Even on shared memory machines, many programmers develop their programs in a message passing style. Programs that do not require fine-grain computation and communication can usually be ported and run effectively on Beowulf clusters. Programming a NOW is usually an attempt to harvest unused cycles on an already installed base of workstations in a lab or on a campus.
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The idea of the Beowulf cluster project was to achieve supercomputer processing power using off-the-shelf commodity machines. One of the earliest Beowulf clusters contained sixteen 100 MHz DX4 processors that were connected using 10 Mbps Ethernet. The second Beowulf cluster, built in 1995, used 100 MHz Pentium processors connected by 100 Mbps Ethernet.
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Beowulf Project