Beowulf Breakthroughs: The Path to Commodity Supercomputing

Dr. Thomas Sterling

Sunday, June 15th, 2003

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A commodity cluster of almost 10,000 PC processors running Linux has been installed and is operational at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), making it one of the world’s most powerful computing systems. While this new system’s performance is extraordinary, its components are rather ordinary, and commodity clusters are quite commonplace.

In fact, about half of the world’s highest performing computing systems (as measured by the Linpack benchmark and registered on the “Top 500″ list at http://www.top500.org) are commodity clusters, with more than 10% of these fastest machines running Linux.

In light of this emerging dominance of commodity clusters, including Beowulf-class PC/Linux clusters, it’s difficult to imagine a time when such systems were of limited scale, utility, and acceptance. Yet, only a decade ago, the world of supercomputing was very different, an age when “big iron” dominated and vectors ruled. But like the dinosaurs they were to metaphorically emulate in their subsequent demise, those costly, once-traditional, high performance computing (HPC) solutions created the environment for their successors, small and inconsequential as they were, to evolve.

The genesis of Beowulf-class clusters was ignited by the inadequacies of classical supercomputers and the opportunities of emerging hardware and software technologies. Indeed, Beowulf itself would catalyze a paradigm shift in high performance computing that would dominate the beginning of the 21st Century. But in its most incipient phase, nothing appeared more unlikely.