Concepts in Beowulfery

Forrest Hoffman

Tuesday, January 15th, 2002

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Computational scientists were early adopters of Linux because of its reliability and efficiency. These folks needed a powerful yet stable computing platform to run their complex scientific simulations. Linux provided a solid development platform and had the reliability and stability they required. Additionally, the open source aspect of Linux was appealing because the open source development process paralleled the scientific method; the code is widely published and reviewed by others prior to acceptance.

Linux caused something of a revolution in computational science. When NASA needed an inexpensive way to solve large computational problems in earth and space sciences in 1994, a group of researchers led by Thomas Sterling decided to hook up a bunch of PCs running Linux to see if they could be made to function like a supercomputer. They justified this experiment through the economics of the problem; commercial supercomputers are enormously expensive to purchase and operate.

Sterling’s experiment, called the Beowulf Project (http://www.beowulf.org), was a success; since then, clusters of PCs, now called Beowulf clusters or just Beowulfs, have sprung up in research laboratories, companies, and academic institutions around the world. Beowulfs are affordable for small research groups or even individuals and can be dedicated to solving single problems. Some researchers even managed to build a Beowulf without any budget, simply by using surplus PCs and some institutional infrastructure (http://stonesoup.esd.ornl.gov). As many supercomputer manufacturers went out of business in the 1990s, the survivors learned from the Beowulf movement that building clusters…

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