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Beowulf Cluster
A Beowulf cluster is a computer cluster of normally identical, commodity-grade computers networked into a small local area network with libraries and programs installed that allow processing to be shared among them. The result is a high-performance parallel computing cluster from inexpensive personal computer hardware. Original Beowulf originally referred to a specific computer built in 1994 by Thomas Sterling (computing), Thomas Sterling and Donald Becker at NASA. They named it after the Old English epic poem, ''Beowulf''. Systems 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 customization. Most Beowulf clusters run a Unix-like operating system, such as Berkeley Software Distribution, BSD, Linux, or Solaris (operating system), Solaris. Commonly used parallel processing libraries include Message Passing Interface (MPI) and Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM). Both of these permit th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Berkeley Software Distribution
The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), also known as Berkeley Unix or BSD Unix, is a discontinued Unix operating system developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, beginning in 1978. It began as an improved derivative of AT&T's original Unix that was developed at Bell Labs, based on the source code but over time diverging into its own code. BSD would become a pioneer in the advancement of Unix and computing. BSD's development was begun initially by Bill Joy, who added virtual memory capability to Unix running on a VAX-11 computer. In the 1980s, BSD was widely adopted by workstation vendors in the form of proprietary Unix distributions such as DEC Ultrix and Sun Microsystems SunOS due to its permissive licensing and familiarity to many technology company founders and engineers. It also became the most popular Unix at universities, where it was used for the study of operating systems. BSD was sponsored ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ethernet
Ethernet ( ) is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 1983 as IEEE 802.3. Ethernet has since been refined to support higher bit rates, a greater number of nodes, and longer link distances, but retains much backward compatibility. Over time, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies such as Token Ring, FDDI and ARCNET. The original 10BASE5 Ethernet uses a thick coaxial cable as a shared medium. This was largely superseded by 10BASE2, which used a thinner and more flexible cable that was both less expensive and easier to use. More modern Ethernet variants use Ethernet over twisted pair, twisted pair and fiber optic links in conjunction with Network switch, switches. Over the course of its history, Ethernet data transfer rates have been increased from the original to the lates ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Linux Documentation Project
The Linux Documentation Project (LDP) is a dormant 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. In 2008, LDP started ''The LDP Wiki''; the wiki has since gone offline with the last entry dating to 2016. the most r ... [...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 restri ... [...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 benchmarks, a portable implementation of the high-performance LINPACK benchmarks, LINPACK benchmark written in Fortran for Distributed memory, distributed-memory computers. The most recent edition of TOP500 was published in June 2025 as the 65th edition of TOP500, while the next edition of TOP500 will be published in November 2025 as the 66th edition of TOP500. As of June 2025, the United States' El Capitan (supercomputer), El ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scientific Computing
Computational science, also known as scientific computing, technical computing or scientific computation (SC), is a division of science, and more specifically the Computer Sciences, which uses advanced computing capabilities to understand and solve complex physical problems. While this typically extends into computational specializations, this field of study includes: * Algorithms ( numerical and non-numerical): mathematical models, computational models, and computer simulations developed to solve sciences (e.g, physical, biological, 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 simu ... [...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 MPICH development began in 1992, when a standard for message passing in parallel and distributed computing was still being discussed. MPICH tracked the development of the MPI standard as it evolved. This served dual purpose: to prove that the MPI standard could be implemented as defined, and that it could be done efficiently on all major platforms. Argonne National Laboratory and Mississippi State University jointly developed early versions (MPICH1) as public domain software. The CH part of the name was derived from "Chameleon", which was a portable parallel programming library devel ... [...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 tha ... [...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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
