A rich cousin of mine has recently offered me a job working on a beowulf cluster that he’s building. He plans on getting a bunch of guys my age (18) together and, after giving us the necessary information, setting us loose to create our monster. I was just wondering if any of you happened to know much about such a monster. We are also getting to play with some M$ beta stuff and some things fresh out of the DoD that he happens to have some connections with. All I know at this moment is that it is going to be awesome as hell but I really don’t have a real clue as to what this will entail.
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I’m more looking for shop talk. I know the basics but need some specifics. We’re planning to use hundreds (maybe thousands) of old, outdated computers as our nodes to power some kind of biotech imaging system.
And you can use lots and lots of potatoes to generate the electricity to power them.
Uh I’ve read the epic poem Beowulf, but what’s a Beowulf cluster?
You get a bunch of people dressed up like Beowulf and have them draw stuff, like medical images.
Or maybe it is just a sytem to connect a bunch of computers together to compute stuff faster.
For those who don’t know, a beowulf cluster is a special type of computer system, which uses multiple PCs linked together to split the load of large calculations and other processing work. In simple terms think of it as a large computer system with multiple CPUs linked together, sort of like a dual processor PC on steroids.
I personally haven’t had the chance to work with one so unfortunately I can’t really help you.
Kinda like that SETI thing?
SETI and similiar projects have the computers communicate over the internet, so there is relatively low bandwidth. This limits that sort of thing to tasks that can be split up into independent chunks that take a while to work on.
With a Beowulf cluster, the communication between computers is a bit better and more reliable. Deathstryke said it would be used for biotech imaging. To do that, each computer could be assigned a section of the image to draw, and then they put all the images together to make one big image.
Supercomputers go a step further and connect together lots of processors with gigabytes of bandwidth between them, allowing them to perform highly complex simulations.
All I really know is that this is going to be one hell of an opportunity for me. I hope it all goes well.
Why are these clusters named after Beowulf?
who knows. I know that that is the name of the program used to get them to work in parallel.
They just are. It’s a catchy name.
Or I can try to fabricate a reason: Beowulf clusters slay the grendel of hard to maintain supercomputer systems? Uhh because like, uh, they are easier to upgrade and stuff, while maintaining compatibility with the software written for them. Uh, yeah.