What is a Beowulf-class supercomputer?
A Beowulf-class supercomputer (or Beowulf cluster, as they are commonly known) is a high-performance distributed multiprocessor built from commodity off-the-shelf computers. These computers are connected together with a commodity network, so that they can communicate with one another. Each computer runs a free, open source operating system (often Linux), and typically provides a communications library like the Message Passing Interface or the Parallel Virtual Machine to make it “easy” for programs to run and communicate across the network. High performance is achieved by writing the programs in such a way as to have them divide a problem into pieces and solve those pieces on different computers, in parallel. 2. What does teraflop-scale mean? A teraflop-scale computer is one that can perform at least one trillion double-precision floating point operations per second. To illustrate, here are sixty integer problems. If you could solve them in one minute (by hand), you would be able to do
