BEOWULF CLUSTERS
Beowulf clusters are designed to solve high-performance computing tasks.
A Beowulf cluster consists of commodity hardware—such as personal
computers—connected via a simple local-area network. No single specific
software package is required to construct a cluster. Rather, the nodes use a
set of open-source software libraries to communicate with one another. Thus,
there are a variety of approaches to constructing a Beowulf cluster. Typically,
though, Beowulf computing nodes run the Linux operating system. Since
Beowulf clusters require no special hardware and operate using open-source
software that is available free, they offer a low-cost strategy for building
a high-performance computing cluster. In fact, some Beowulf clusters built
from discarded personal computers are using hundreds of nodes to solve
computationally expensive scientific computing problems.