While building a Beowulf cluster is cheap, estimating the true costs of acquiring an entire cluster can sometimes be a headache. Duke University’s Dr. Robert G. Brown describes what you need to know before writing a proposal — or a check — for your first Beowulf.
Beowulf-style supercomputers built out of over-the-counter (OTC) hardware are an economical and practical alternative to expensive, proprietary hardware. Beowulf-like clusters maximize floating point cycles per dollar spent, and small “hobby-scale” beowulfs (less than perhaps eight nodes, where, for the purposes of this article, a node refers to a single case that might house one or more CPUs) can be built almost anywhere and can be managed by anyone with a decent knowledge of Linux or Unix. [As an example, the author has a complete hobby-scale cluster in his home.]
But as the number of nodes increases, one must pay careful attention to physical infrastructure. Cluster nodes consume electricity and generate heat, and therefore require adequate cooling. A cluster weighs a certain amount, and has a footprint and a volume. Clusters require network wiring, and one must be able to physically access the front and/or back of each node to perform regular maintenance.
In a similar vein, if you’re installing only a handful of nodes, where each node takes an hour or even several hours to install, the overall time investment is still slight — perhaps only a day or two. At that scale, it’s fairly easy and relatively inexpensive to put a monitor and keyboard on each node or use a cheap keyboard, video monitor, and mouse (KVM) switch to get to each node to do an install or upgrade. Again, spending minutes per node per…
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