Scientific American: The Do-It-Yourself Supercomputer

J.W. Bizzaro • July 13, 2001

Scientific American: The Do-It-Yourself Supercomputer

``One of us [Thomas Sterling] decided to pursue the then radical concept of building a computing cluster from PCs. Sterling and his [NASA] Goddard colleague Donald J. Becker connected 16 PCs, each containing an Intel 486 microprocessor, using Linux and a standard Ethernet network. For scientific applications, the PC cluster delivered sustained performance of 70 megaflops--that is, 70 million floating-point operations per second. Though modest by today's standards, this speed was not much lower than that of some smaller commercial supercomputers available at the time. And the cluster was built for only $40,000, or about one tenth the price of a comparable commercial machine in 1994.

``NASA researchers named their cluster Beowulf, after the lean, mean hero of medieval legend who defeated the giant monster Grendel by ripping off one of the creature's arms. Since then, the name has been widely adopted to refer to any low-cost cluster constructed from commercially available PCs. In 1996 two successors to the original Beowulf cluster appeared: Hyglac (built by researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and Loki (constructed at Los Alamos National Laboratory). Each cluster integrated 16 Intel Pentium Pro microprocessors and showed sustained performance of over one gigaflops at a cost of less than $50,000, thus satisfying NASA's original goal.''

Full story:
http://www.sciam.com/2001/0801issue/0801hargrove.html

Reference by LinuxToday.com.

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