High-performance computing (HPC) using clusters has come a long, long way from its early days. Back then, a cluster was a network of disparate workstations, which often sat on people’s desks, harnessed together into a Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) computation. Back then, nascent Beowulf clusters consisted of cheap tower PCs literally stacked up on shelves.
Early on, cluster computing was only being done by a tiny handful of people — usually by computer scientists who were working on building the future or by people who were doing real science (with computers) who needed the future a bit before the future was ready for them. To those pioneers, a “network” generally meant 10-Base-2 Ethernet — a daisy chain network terminated with resistors at both ends that used these nifty (and expensive) little AUI doohickeys to connect very expensive Unix workstations to RG-58 coaxial cable — or worse, a thickwire Ethernet, which used a bloodsucking device known as a “vampire tap” to make the actual connection to the wire (preferably spaced on a half-meter mark to minimize reflections) to insert a coaxial “T” connector.
The Unix used in those pre-Beowulf days almost certainly belonged to a vendor. Very little in the arrangement was free, very little was open source, but it was still much cheaper than getting compute cycles in large quantities any other way.
Now, of course, using clusters to do HPC is absolutely ubiquitous. Cluster computers have actually beaten chess masters and competitions are held every year…
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