Beowulf cluster
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A Beowulf cluster uses commodity computers networked together with shared libraries and programs to function as a single high-performance parallel computing system. It uses inexpensive personal computers running a Unix-like operating system with message passing software. The original Beowulf cluster was built in 1994 by NASA scientists to function like a single powerful computer through distributed processing across the networked nodes.
Beowulf cluster
- 2. 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. Cluster means ,a group of similar objects growing closely together.
- 3. 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 main character in the Old English epic poem Beowulf.
- 5. There is no particular piece of software that defines a cluster as a Beowulf. Beowulf clusters normally run a Unix- like operating system, such as BSD,Linux, or Solaris, normally built from free and open source software
- 6. Beowulf is a multi-computer architecture which can be used for parallel computations. Beowulf is a multi-computer architecture which can be used for parallel computations. It is a system built using commodity hardware components, like any PC capable of running a Unix-like operating system, with standard Ethernet adapters,
- 7. Beowulf also uses commodity software like the FreeBSD, Linux or Solaris , Knoppix operating system, Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) and Message Passing Interface (MPI). The server node controls the whole cluster and serves files to the client nodes. It is also the cluster's console and gateway to the outside world
- 8. Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, Michael Lesk and Joe Ossanna. In 1974, UNIX was first licensed to an outside institution, the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, by Greg Chesson and Donald B. Gillies.
- 9. One of the main differences between Beowulf and a Cluster of Workstations (COW) is that Beowulf behaves more like a single machine rather than many workstations. In most cases client nodes do not have keyboards or monitors, and are accessed only via remote login or possibly serial terminal. Beowulf nodes can be thought of as a CPU + memory package which can be plugged into the cluster, just like a CPU or memory module can be plugged into a motherboard.
- 10. The server node controls the whole cluster and serves files to the client nodes. It is also the cluster's console and gateway to the outside world. Large Beowulf machines might have more than one server node, and possibly other nodes dedicated to particular tasks, for example consoles or monitoring stations. In most cases client nodes in a Beowulf system are dumb, the dumber the better. Nodes are configured and controlled by the server node, and do only what they are told to do. In a disk-less client configuration,
- 12. Beowulf is not a special software package, new network topology, or the latest kernel hack. Beowulf is a technology of clustering computers to form a parallel, virtual supercomputer. Although there are many software packages such as kernel modifications, PVM and MPI libraries, and configuration tools which make the Beowulf architecture faster, easier to configure, and much more usable. one can build a Beowulf class machine using a standard Linux distribution without any additional software. If you have two networked computers which share at least the /home file system , and trust each other to execute remote shells (rsh),
- 13. Clusters have a variety of different applications in the world They are used in bioinformatics to run DNA string matching algorithms or to run protein folding applications.
- 17. A cluster can be set up by using Knoppix bootable CDs in combination with OpenMosix. The computers will automatically link together, without need for complex configurations, to form a Beowulf cluster using all CPUs and RAM in the cluster A Beowulf cluster is scalable to a nearly unlimited number of computers, limited only by the overhead of the network.
- 18. Provisioning of operating systems and other software for a Beowulf Cluster can be automated using software, Open Source Cluster Application Resources (OSCAR) for example. OSCAR installs on top of a standard installation of a supported Linux distribution on a cluster's head node.