From the horse's mouth

[Urban Ranger]

Microsoft researchers endorse Linux clusters

TWO SENIOR RESEARCHERS at Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center have endorsed Linux Beowulf clusters as the future of scientific computing.

The pair, Gordon Bell and Jim Gray, casually mentioned this in passing during a presentation given at the National Research Council's Computer Science and Telecommunications Board meeting held last month at Stanford University.

Good for these researchers, I say

[Dauphin]

Since when does Endorsed = Mentioned casually in passing ?

[Urban Ranger]

Did you read the linked article?

[Harovan]

I see at least three years Microsoft reeducation camp in somebody's future...

[Dauphin]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
Did you read the linked article?

It didn't mean a whole lot to me.

[Paul Hanson]

Great, just what we needed; yet more Asher-baiting.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Big Crunch
It didn't mean a whole lot to me.

Not the Inquirer one, the NYT one.

[Dauphin]

I don't feel like registering.

[The Mad Monk]

I wonder who *ahem* researched the aticle?

[Ted Striker]

Wow a questionable article from a Linux magazine.

I'm convinced.

I'm trashing all my PC's and installing Debian now.

[Asher]

What a joke.

Linux is mentioned once in the NYT article:

By rewriting existing scientific programs, they say, researchers will be able to get powerful computing from inexpensive clusters of personal computers that are running the free Linux software operating system.

It's a huge misunderstanding because the Inquirer and Linux geeks seem to interpret "beowulf cluster" to mean "Linux".

Hello, Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 have clustering capabilities, too.

[Wraith]

--"It's a huge misunderstanding because the Inquirer and Linux geeks seem to interpret "beowulf cluster" to mean "Linux"."

Um... that's because that's pretty much how it's supposed to be interpreted. Linux or *BSD.

http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/beowulf-faq.txt

1. What's a Beowulf? [1999-05-13]

It's a kind of high-performance massively parallel computer built primarily out of commodity hardware components, running a free-software operating system like Linux or FreeBSD, interconnected by a private high-speed network. It consists of a cluster of PCs or workstations dedicated to running high-performance computing tasks. The nodes in the cluster don't sit on people's desks; they are dedicated to running cluster jobs. It is usually connected to the outside world through only a single node.

Some Linux clusters are built for reliability instead of speed. These are not Beowulfs.

Wraith
Approach. Bow and scrape. State your business.

[Asher]

Beowulf Clusters are simply high-speed clusters of computers.

Nowhere is it defined being Linux/BSD only, those just happen to be the most common applications.

Hell, at the time that definition was created, Windows didn't have clustering support.

Beowulf cluster is essentially a number of commodity or of the
shelf PCs tied together using some sort of protocol. Developed
by NASA, Beowulf clusters gained much attention in the last few
years. Often at a fraction of a cost of a "real" supercomputer
a beowulf cluster is comparable (or even exceeds) the
computational power of a super computer. For instance the a
cluster made out of 320 ubiquitous P3-800 CPUs takes 34th place
on the TOP500 super computer list with peak performance of over
a teraflop!


What is required for a beowulf cluster

Essentially all that is needed is a number of available machines.
Historically most of the software written for beowulf clusters
is Linux based. Due to centralized nature of beowulf clusters
machines will need to communicate to the central server.
Ethernet is both cheap and widely available which makes it
especially convenient. On top of Linux you'll have to run some
sort of communication layer which will provide the required
infrastructure between the nodes of your beowulf cluster. There
are few choices; among them OSCAR from NCSA and LAM-MPI
developed by a team from University of Notre Dame. We've chosen
LAM-MPI because of it's simplicity and because of the fact that
it's being continuously developed.


Why would you want to have a beowulf cluster

Although there are certain drawbacks to beowulf clusters they
provide a cheap alternative to buying a "real" super computer.
For instance in a school like Langara there are hundreds unused
computers during off peak hours. Students doing simulations or
other research could possibly use these idle computers to their
advantage. Supercomputers in general and beowulf clusters in
particular have been used for everything from chess playing to
cancer and nuclear research. Moving away from serious research
subjects we've found that there are applications out there that
will allow you to encode your music into mp3 format using
distributed approach - namely clustering software.

[Wraith]

Sorry Asher, but you're wrong. I quoted and linked the official Beowulf FAQ. What are you quoting? According to the guys who started it, a Beowulf requires running a free OS, otherwise it'll just be a cluster.

Or are you contending that Windows is a free OS? ^_^

Wraith
Warning: Whimsical when bored