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. Beowulf clusters normally run a Unix-like operating system, such as BSD, Linux, or Solaris, normally built from free and open source software. 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 computers, and collect the results of processing. Examples of MPI software include OpenMPI or MPICH. There are additional MPI implementations available.

As of 2014^[update] Beowulf systems operate worldwide, chiefly in support of scientific computing.

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