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Beowulf Cluster — A Poor Man’s Supercomputer

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Abstract

In this article, I describe the development of the Beowulf cluster, a parallel computer that consists of a network of off-the-shelf personal computers interconnected by Ethernet and uses Linux as its operating system. This style of building parallel computers has become very popular as fairly high-performance computers can be built in a university laboratory at a reasonable cost. Eighty percent of supercomputers listed in the TOP500 list of the fastest computers in the world are clusters.

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Suggested Reading

  1. Beowulf clusters make supercomputers accessible, NASA Publication, 2020. https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2020/it_1.html

  2. Donald J. Becker, Thomas Sterling, Daniel Savarese, John E. Dorband, Udaya A. Ranawake, and Charles V. Packer, Beowulf: A parallel workstation for scientific computation, Proceedings, International Conference on Parallel Processing, 1995. (Accessible at webhome.phy.duke.edu).

  3. Steve McGrath, Supercomputing gets a new hero, The Free Library, Nelson Publishing, 1998. https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Supercomputing+gets+a+new+hero-a021071072

  4. What is Beowulf? http://yclept.ucdavis.edu/Beowulf/aboutbeowulf.html

  5. Douglas Aberdeen, Jonathan Baxter, and Robert Edwards, 92ȼ/MFlop/s ultra large-scale neural-network training on a P III cluster, IEEE Computer Society. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.05181.pdf

  6. See https://www.top500.org/

  7. See https://sc22.supercomputing.org/program/studentssc/student-cluster-competition/

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Acknowledgment

I thank Prof. P. C. P. Bhatt, Dr. N. Dayasindhu, Prof. R. Govindarajan, and Prof. S. Ramani for reviewing this article and their valuable suggestions that improved it.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Supercomputer Education & Research Centre, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, 560 012, India

    V. Rajaraman

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  1. V. Rajaraman
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Correspondence to V. Rajaraman.

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V. Rajaraman is at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. Several generations of scientists and engineers in India have learnt computer science using his lucidly written textbooks on programming and computer fundamentals. His current research interests are parallel computing and history of computing.

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Rajaraman, V. Beowulf Cluster — A Poor Man’s Supercomputer. Reson 28, 247–253 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-023-1546-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-023-1546-z

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