Beowulf: Harnessing the Power of Parallelism in a Pile-of-PCs (1997)
| Venue: | Proceedings, IEEE Aerospace |
| Citations: | 82 - 1 self |
BibTeX
@INPROCEEDINGS{Ridge97beowulf:harnessing,
author = {Daniel Ridge and Donald Becker and Phillip Merkey and Thomas Sterling},
title = {Beowulf: Harnessing the Power of Parallelism in a Pile-of-PCs},
booktitle = {Proceedings, IEEE Aerospace},
year = {1997},
pages = {79--91}
}
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Abstract
The rapid increase in performance of mass market commodity microprocessors and significant disparity in pricing between PCs and scientific workstations has provided an opportunity for substantial gains in performance to cost by harnessing PC technology in parallel ensembles to provide high end capability for scientific and engineering applications. The Beowulf project is a NASA initiative sponsored by the HPCC program to explore the potential of Pileof -PCs and to develop the necessary methodologies to apply these low cost system configurations to NASA computational requirements in the Earth and space sciences. Recently, a 16 processor Beowulf costing less than $50,000 sustained 1.25 Gigaflops on a gravitational Nbody simulation of 10 million particles with a Tree code algorithm using standard commodity hardware and software components. This paper describes the technologies and methodologies employed to achieve this breakthrough. Both opportunities afforded by this approach and the cha...
