What is a “Beowulf cluster”?
The term “Beowulf cluster” refers to a cluster of workstations (usually Intel architecture, but not necessarily) running some flavor of Linux that is utilized as a parallel computation resource. The main idea is to use commodity, off-the-shelf computing components to create a networked cluster of workstations. LAM is a favorite tool of many Beowulf cluster users; they use LAM to write parallel programs to run on their clusters. LAM tends to be “cluster friendly” by using small daemons to effect fast process control, application startup/shutdown, etc.
A Beowulf Computer Cluster is a set of low-cost, off-the-shelf computers that are connected via a standard network and special software. These connected computers can then perform as a single programmable “supercomputer.” Typically, the individual computers are inexpensive PCs running Linux connected together through regular networking. Beowulf-class computer clusters can span the range from a few, older PCs to an entire building of fast, ultra-modern workstations. A Beowulf-class supercomputer could be utilized by anyone performing computations. In its simplest usage, the cluster can be used as a convenient method to run multiple copies of the same program. For example, say you had a Java program that crunches some numbers. You could simply run many copies of that program at once, all in parallel. More sophisticated parallelization would require more complicated programming. However, there are intermediate tools available that allow one to reap the benefits of parallel processing with
