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Beowulf (Computing)Beowulf is a design for high-performance parallel computing clusters on inexpensive personal computer hardware. Originally developed by Donald Becker at NASA, Beowulf systems are now deployed worldwide, chiefly in support of scientific computing. A Beowulf cluster is a group of usually identical PC computers running FreeBSD or another open source Unix operating system, such as Linux or OpenBSD. They are networked into a small TCP/IP LAN, and have libraries and programs installed which allow processing to be shared among them. There is no particular piece of software that defines a cluster as a Beowulf. Commonly used parallel processing libraries include MPI (Message Passing Interface) and PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine). Both of these permit the programmer to divide a task among a group of networked computers, and recollect the results of processing. The name comes from the legend of Beowulf. A very interesting development is the use of linux/knoppix bootable CDs in combination with openMosix. A cluster can be implemented without any settings required. It is scalable to any number of computers in a network. Booting the computers like this will automatically link them together to form a Beowulf cluster and it will be ready for use adding all CPUs and RAM together. Presently, there are a number of different Linux distributions that are designed for building Beowulf clusters. These include: Examples See also External links
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