P.S.

CHANDRA KANTH
06951A0570
Btech CSE IV year
What are clusters?
A cluster is a type of parallel or distributed
processing system, which consists of a
collection of interconnected standalon
computers co - operatively working together
as a single, integrated computing resource.
This cluster of computers shares common
networkcharacteristics like the same
namespace and it is available toother
computers on the network as a single
resource.
What is beowulf?
Mythical Old-English hero who defeats
Grendel, the green dragon
Movie starring a CG-animated Angelina Jolie
Cluster architecture
Beowulf cluster history
1993 - Becker & Sterling started Beowulf project
1994 – Becker & Sterling constructed a 16 node
cluster
1996 – DOE and NASA demonstrate beowulf cluster
that surpasses 1GFlop/s
1997 – Caltech demonstrates beowulf cluster that
surpasses 10GFlop/s
Present – beowulf clusters are used at many
universities, industries, and government sites
What is a beowulf
cluster?
Collection of stand-alone computer networked
together
Network equipment to connect computers
Software
Operating system software
Application software
Communication software (MPI, OpenMP)
A Beowulf cluster is a group of usually identical PC
computers running a  Free and Open Source
Software (FOSS)  Unix-like operating system, such
as BSD, Linux or Solaris.
They are networked into a small  TCP/IP LAN, and
have libraries and programs installed which allow
processing to be shared among them.
There is no particular piece of software that defines
a cluster as a Beowulf.
Commonly used parallel processing libraries include
MPI (Message Passing Interface) and PVM (Parallel
Virtual Machine).
The Borg, a 52-node Beowulf cluster used by the 
McGill University pulsargroup to search for pulsations
from binary pulsars
Contributing Factors
 A number of factors have contributed to the growth of Beowulf
class computers.

 The prevalence of computers for office automation, home

computing, games and entertainment now provide system
designers with new types of cost-effective components.
 The COTS industry now provides fully assembled subsystems
(microprocessors, motherboards, disks and network interface
cards).
 Mass market competition has driven the prices down and
reliability up for these subsystems.
 The availability of open source software, particularly the Linux
operating system, GNU compilers and programming tools and
MPI and PVM message passing libraries.
Programs like the HPCC program have produced
many years of experience working with parallel
algorithms.

The recognition that obtaining high performance,

even from vendor provided, parallel platforms is hard
work and requires researchers to adopt a do-it-
yourself attitude.

An increased reliance on computational science

which demands high performance computing.
Uses of Beowulf Cluster
People use Beowulf Clusters to solve computational
intensive tasks
Beowulf Clusters are used typically used to solve tasks
that take several hours to days and even weeks to
complete. These include :
*Computational fluid dynamics for aerospace
*Financial market modeling (eg. with Monte Carlo
simulations)
*Genomics Sequencing
*Computational Chemistry
*Seismic Analysis
*Digital Media Rendering
*Electronic & Design Applications
Conclusion
Clusters are promising
Solve parallel processing paradox
Offer incremental growth and matches with
funding pattern
New trends in hardware and software
technologies are likely to make clusters more
promosing and fill SSI gap.
Clusters based super computers (Linux based
clusters) can be seen every where!
REFERENCE
www.buyya.com
www.beowulf.org
www.clustercomp.org