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Stone Soupercomputer
The Stone Soupercomputer was a Beowulf-style computer cluster built at the US Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the late 1990s. A group of lab employees including William W. Hargrove and Forrest M. Hoffman applied for a grant to build a cluster in 1996, but it was rejected. Software was patterned after the Beowulf project pioneered by NASA. They decided to build a cluster anyway, using desktop personal computers that had been discarded as being too slow. The name was derived from the story of stone soup. The developers used freely available and open source software such as Linux operating system, the Parallel Virtual Machine toolkit, and the Message Passing Interface library. By early 1997 the first applications were running on the cluster. By May 2001 it had 133 nodes. They included Intel 80486 and Pentium-based machines as well as a few DEC Alpha workstations. Low-cost Ethernet networking was used for interconnection instead of any special-purpose network. The cluster was the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Beowulf Cluster
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 compu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
