Beowulf is a design for high-performance parallel computing clusters on inexpensive personal computer hardware. Originally developed by Donald Becker at NASA, Beowulf systems are now deployed worldwide, chiefly in support of scientific computing. A Beowulf cluster is a group of usually identical PC computers running a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Unix-like operating system, such as Linux or BSD. They are networked into a small TCP/IP LAN, and have libraries and programs installed which allow processing to be shared among them. There is no particular piece of software that defines a cluster as a Beowulf. Commonly used parallel processing libraries include MPI (Message Passing Interface) and PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine). Both of these permit the programmer to divide a task among a group of networked computers, and recollect the results of processing. It is a common misconception that any software will run faster on a Beowulf. However, this is not true. The software must be re-written to take advantage of the cluster, and specifically have multiple non-dependent parallel computations involved in its execution.

As a grid software vendor, Brain Murmurs has invested considerable energy researching Beowulf Clusters. We also worked with Cray to port an information retrieval system to a proprietary 32-processor Beowulf cluster. The extreme complexity of setting up Beowulfs led the idea of JIVA, our low-cost alternative. Related Clients Cray Related Technologies Information Retrieval Supercomputing Computational Fluid Dynamics JIVA