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Beowulf (computing)
A Beowulf cluster is a computer cluster of what are normally identical, commodity-grade computers networked into a small local area network with libraries and programs installed which allow processing to be shared among them. The result is a high-performance parallel computing cluster from inexpensive personal computer hardware. The name ''Beowulf'' originally referred to a specific computer built in 1994 by Thomas Sterling and Donald Becker at NASA. The name "Beowulf" comes from the Old English epic poem of the same name. No particular piece of software defines a cluster as a Beowulf. Typically only free and open source software is used, both to save cost and to allow customisation. Most Beowulf clusters run a Unix-like operating system, such as BSD, Linux, or Solaris. Commonly used parallel processing libraries include Message Passing Interface (MPI) and Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM). Both of these permit the programmer to divide a task among a group of networked computers, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Berkeley Software Distribution
The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley. The term "BSD" commonly refers to its open-source descendants, including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and DragonFly BSD. BSD was initially called Berkeley Unix because it was based on the source code of the original Unix developed at Bell Labs. In the 1980s, BSD was widely adopted by workstation vendors in the form of proprietary Unix variants such as DEC Ultrix and Sun Microsystems SunOS due to its permissive licensing and familiarity to many technology company founders and engineers. Although these proprietary BSD derivatives were largely superseded in the 1990s by UNIX SVR4 and OSF/1, later releases provided the basis for several open-source operating systems including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly BSD, Darwin, and TrueOS ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Parallel Computation
Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. There are several different forms of parallel computing: bit-level, instruction-level, data, and task parallelism. Parallelism has long been employed in high-performance computing, but has gained broader interest due to the physical constraints preventing frequency scaling.S.V. Adve ''et al.'' (November 2008)"Parallel Computing Research at Illinois: The UPCRC Agenda" (PDF). Parallel@Illinois, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "The main techniques for these performance benefits—increased clock frequency and smarter but increasingly complex architectures—are now hitting the so-called power wall. The computer industry has accepted that future performance increases must largely come from increasing the number of processors (or cores) on a die, rather than mak ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Computer Architecture
In computer engineering, computer architecture is a description of the structure of a computer system made from component parts. It can sometimes be a high-level description that ignores details of the implementation. At a more detailed level, the description may include the instruction set architecture design, microarchitecture design, logic design, and implementation. History The first documented computer architecture was in the correspondence between Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, describing the analytical engine. When building the computer Z1 in 1936, Konrad Zuse described in two patent applications for his future projects that machine instructions could be stored in the same storage used for data, i.e., the stored-program concept. Two other early and important examples are: * John von Neumann's 1945 paper, First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, which described an organization of logical elements; and *Alan Turing's more detailed ''Proposed Electronic Calculator'' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Linux Documentation Project
The Linux Documentation Project (LDP) is a dormant an all-volunteer project that maintains a large collection of GNU and Linux-related documentation and publishes the collection online. It began as a way for hackers to share their documentation with each other and with their users, and for users to share documentation with each other. Its documents tend to be oriented towards experienced users such as professional system administrators, but it also contains tutorials for beginners. History The LDP originally began as an FTP site in 1992, but it went on the World Wide Web at MetaLab in 1993. It is believed to have been the first Linux related website ever. Today, the LDP serves over 475 documents contributed by even more authors. About a dozen of them are book length, and most of those are available in print from major technical publishers including O'Reilly Media, O'Reilly. On 1 September 2008, LDP started a wiki to allow a better interaction with the authors and the users, wi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Blade Server
A blade server is a stripped-down server computer with a modular design optimized to minimize the use of physical space and energy. Blade servers have many components removed to save space, minimize power consumption and other considerations, while still having all the functional components to be considered a computer. Unlike a rack-mount server, a blade server fits inside a blade enclosure, which can hold multiple blade servers, providing services such as power, cooling, networking, various interconnects and management. Together, blades and the blade enclosure form a blade system, which may itself be rack-mounted. Different blade providers have differing principles regarding what to include in the blade itself, and in the blade system as a whole. In a ''standard'' server-rack configuration, one rack unit or 1U— wide and tall—defines the minimum possible size of any equipment. The principal benefit and justification of blade computing relates to lifting this restrict ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Top500
The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coincides with the International Supercomputing Conference in June, and the second is presented at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in November. The project aims to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing and bases rankings on HPL (benchmark), HPL, a portable implementation of the high-performance LINPACK Benchmark (computing), benchmark written in Fortran for distributed-memory computers. The 60th TOP500 was published in November 2022. Since June 2022, USA's Frontier (supercomputer), Frontier is the most powerful supercomputer on TOP500, reaching 1102 petaFlops (1.102 exaFlops) on the LINPACK benchmarks. The United States has by far the highest share of total computing ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scientific Computing
Computational science, also known as scientific computing or scientific computation (SC), is a field in mathematics that uses advanced computing capabilities to understand and solve complex problems. It is an area of science that spans many disciplines, but at its core, it involves the development of models and simulations to understand natural systems. * Algorithms ( numerical and non-numerical): mathematical models, computational models, and computer simulations developed to solve science (e.g., biological, physical, and social), engineering, and humanities problems * Computer hardware that develops and optimizes the advanced system hardware, firmware, networking, and data management components needed to solve computationally demanding problems * The computing infrastructure that supports both the science and engineering problem solving and the developmental computer and information science In practical use, it is typically the application of computer simulation and other fo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
MPICH
MPICH, formerly known as MPICH2, is a freely available, portable implementation of MPI, a standard for message-passing for distributed-memory applications used in parallel computing. MPICH is Free and open source software with some public domain components that were developed by a US governmental organisation, and is available for most flavours of Unix-like OS (including Linux and Mac OS X). History The Argonne National Laboratory and Mississippi State University jointly developed early versions (MPICH-1) as public domain software. The CH part of the name was derived from "Chameleon", which was a portable parallel programming library developed by William Gropp, one of the founders of MPICH. The original implementation of MPICH (sometimes called "MPICH1") implemented the MPI-1.1 standard. Starting around 2001, work began on a new code base to replace the MPICH1 code and support the MPI-2 standard. Until November 2012, this project was known as "MPICH2". As of November 2012, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Open MPI
Open MPI is a Message Passing Interface (MPI) library project combining technologies and resources from several other projects (FT-MPI, LA-MPI, LAM/MPI, and PACX-MPI). It is used by many TOP500 supercomputers including Roadrunner, which was the world's fastest supercomputer from June 2008 to November 2009, and K computer, the fastest supercomputer from June 2011 to June 2012. Overview Open MPI represents the merger between three well-known MPI implementations: * FT-MPI from the University of Tennessee * LA-MPI from Los Alamos National Laboratory * LAM/MPI from Indiana University with contributions from the PACX-MPI team at the University of Stuttgart. These four institutions comprise the founding members of the Open MPI development team. The Open MPI developers selected these MPI implementations as excelling in one or more areas. Open MPI aims to use the best ideas and technologies from the individual projects and create one world-class open-source MPI implementation that ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Parallel Virtual Machine
Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) is a software tool for parallel networking of computers. It is designed to allow a network of heterogeneous Unix and/or Windows machines to be used as a single distributed parallel processor. Thus large computational problems can be solved more cost effectively by using the aggregate power and memory of many computers. The software is very portable; the source code, available free through netlib, has been compiled on everything from laptops to Crays. PVM enables users to exploit their existing computer hardware to solve much larger problems at less additional cost. PVM has been used as an educational tool to teach parallel programming but has also been used to solve important practical problems. It was developed by the University of Tennessee, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Emory University. The first version was written at ORNL in 1989, and after being rewritten by University of Tennessee, version 2 was released in March 1991. Version 3 was rel ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
