A Coming of Age for Beowulf-Class Computing

Beowulf-class systems along with other forms of PC clustered systems have matured to the point that they are becoming the strategy of choice for some areas of high performance applications. A Beowulf system is a cluster of mass market COTS personal computers interconnected by means of widely available local area network (LAN) technology. Beowulf software is based on open source code Unix-like operating systems that, in a majority of cases, is Linux. The API for Beowulf is based on message passing semantics and mechanisms including explicit models such as PVM and MPI or implicit models such as BSP of HPF. Since its introduction in 1994, Beowulf-class computing has gone through five generations of PCs from multiple microprocessor vendors including the Intel x86 family, DEC’s Alpha, and the PowerPC from IBM and Motorola. Originally, Beowulfs were implemented as small clusters in the range of 4 to 32 nodes. Larger clusters of 48 to 96 processors were deployed two and a half years ago. Today there are many systems of 100 to 300 processors with systems of over a thousand processors in the planning stage for implementation over the next year.