Originally Published in the December 2003 issue of ClusterWorld Magazine.
In this, the inaugural issue of ClusterWorld, I am pleased to have the opportunity to reflect on a very different era in high performance computing only a decade ago and consider, too, some ill turned words I spoke but a few months ago: “Beowulf is dead.” Taken out of context, as is likely for any such provocative quip, it has evoked some degree of consternation from elements of our community. This statement has been assumed to convey a false and unintended meaning; that the possibility of low cost commodity clusters comprising an integration of mass market computing elements using commercial off the shelf network technology is no longer a viable means to computing large workloads and exploiting parallelism for reduced time to solution. Clearly, this is not the case. One need but to examine the Top500 list to discern the trends in clusters and constellations that demonstrate their dramatic impact on a field that, through their rapid growth, they now dominate. Beowulf is not dead. And yet, for those of us who recall the early challenges of bringing ensembles of PCs to the realm of scientific and technical computing, Beowulf is no longer the same, either.
Only a decade ago, commodity clusters were in their infancy. For those investigating their potential, the world of high performance computing was very different and even unwelcoming. It was a world ruled by big iron, and custom design was the game. A Gigaflops could…
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