Talk:Beowulf (computing)

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[edit] Nearly unlimited

What is nearly unlimited? 10^10, 10^100? Non-sensical statement

People usually mean by that, "most folks won't run into significant limits during ordinary use". If I say "a claw hammer lasts forever" I don't mean that it will outlive the Big Crunch, only that carpenters don't worry about the Mean Time To Failure of claw-hammers, but about other things more urgent. It's OK if we use conversational idiom when it won't be mistaken for precise science Pete St.John 17:19, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Examples

I removed the two examples of @home projects because they are not Beowulf clusters. They are examples of clusters and distributed computing but not Beowulf. Lotu 21:48, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Origin of name

"The name comes from the legend of Beowulf."

How come? The relationship between a superhuman warrior and distributed computing seems somewhat vague to me.

I wa wondering the same myself. The closest I have found is this beowulf.org.

Billlion 15:13, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

It's been six (!) years since I read Beowulf, so my memory is a big hazy. But I believe Beowulf was an incredibly strong warrior who got a Giant's sword. So he could supposedly kill any enemy, if he were 'strong' enough. A distributed computing system, if it were 'big' enough could supposedly solve any problem. (Of course, so too could an ancient, slow computer given enough time. Then again, wind blowing at the enemy would eventually blow away all of his cells). In any case, I doubt there was supposed to be a very exact correlation but if you can't see any connection between a very powerful person and a very powerful computer then you are an idiot.

--Carbonrodney

[edit] What Is Funny About /. Jokes?

There are constant humorous references to Beowulf Cluster on slashdot.com. Will someone explain what the inside joke is, and what is so funny about it? User:Prophetben 8 August 2005

Nothing is "funny" about it - pathetic, perhaps, but not funny - that died a long time ago. The origin of the "joke" came about shortly after the first Beowulf clusters were announced - thereafter every time a new, more powerful CPU or computer was announced on Slashdot, somebody would say "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those". At first such statements were valid, if somewhat vacuous - then like so many other trolls it just became Yet Another Stupid Thing To Post. N0YKG 17:19, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] More Depth Please

I was still left with a few unanswered questions - mainly, simply "Why?" - the answer I assume is performance related, but it would be nice to know more about that - e.g. optimum number of machines in the cluster, How performance increases per machine etc...

optimum number? it depends on the task... if it is really large and easily splittable then as many computers as you can link up. if the task is small or they can't be split, then just one computer will execute best. so basically, if you have a lot of nodes in the cluster then chance is the optimum number of nodes will be reached. note also, you cannot really 'overshoot' as tasks are divided in such a way as to avoid this.
performance doesn't increase normally per machine. the whole system's maximum performance can be much better (as a complicated sum based on processing power but limited by memory and network delays)
As for "Why": yes, any task (computation) that requires a 'supercomputer'... eg: large prime finding, astronomic calculations, clustering (the other type, as in clustering vectors) or ray-tracing and many other graphics computations, or just to run Oblivion with milisecond load time. :D
--Carbon Rodney
Why? Consider this: you can buy a 3GHz PC for say $1000. You cannot buy a 6GHz PC, but you could pay much more than $2000 for a liquid-nitrogen cooled supercomputer. However, you can buy two 3GHz machines for $2000, network them to work together, and for a distibutable application you get the effect of 6GHz cheap. Scientific laboratories do this on a large scale, see e.g. High Performance Computing (HPC). One fun game is to maximize TeraFLOPS per dollar.
And Carbon, how do you load Oblivion on your Beowulf? WINE? Could Vanguard have less lag if I loaded the client on HPC? Pete St.John 19:25, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
If you can get some form of Linux on which WINE will run for the cluster, then you have a machine on which you can game. With enough processor power, you would not need a GPU, because software rendering would be fast enough. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 150.101.102.188 (talk) 01:49, 3 April 2007 (UTC).

[edit] Home "Build"

I reverted the caption of an image from "low cost home built" back to "home build". Two things: first, "build" is used by engineers as a noun as in this case, meaning "the built thing" (as opposed to "building" which connotes something large like a house). Also, "low-cost" is redundant with the definition of Beowulf. I don't like to be so picky (there are plenty of editors around who specialize in that :-) but since both elements of the change were a bit weak I just reverted.Pete St.John 16:24, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] On Portal:Free software, Beowulf is now the selected article

Just to let you know. The purpose of selecting an article is both to point readers to the article and to highlight it to potential contributors. It will remain on the portal for a week or so. The previous selected article was LyX. Gronky 02:22, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

Things have moved on, as they nearly always do, and the new selectee is the article on the Debian Free Software Guidelines. --Gronky 21:37, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] XGrid Beowulf or not?

Is Apple's XGrid a Beowulf cluster? It's distributed, UNIX-based and FOSS on the underside. Xgrid's page mentions it ran on OPENSTEP as well, so there must have been FOSS implementaiton of Xgrid as well... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.92.248.233 (talk) 23:33, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Beowulf and Windows ??? Is this possible?

hi..!

I read an article on linking Beowulf clusters with Microsoft Windows using a middleware called Active computing interface (ACI). I would like to know, whether it is possible to work on Beowulf clusters with Windows as a platform? and if it is, can anyone tell me more technical details of it? Do we still call it a Beowulf Cluster?

The link for the article is: http://hpcnc.cpe.ku.ac.th/publication/publication/Publication%20Files/LINKING%20BEOWULF%20CLUSTERS%20AND%20WINDOWS%20ENVIRONMENT%20USING%20A%20MIDDLEWARE%20APPROACH.pdf


--- Priyank. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.7.84.3 (talk) 23:58, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Not possible technically, no; Beowulf is supposed to be Open Source, but MS has gotten into the business of cluster computing. You can read MS's advertising for it at MS's Computer Cluster Server page. Labs which are funded by MS use it. Pete St.John 16:47, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] A Wisconsin undergrad link

I deleted an external link to an undergraduate's blog about his intention to build a beowulf. It looks like he's doing a good thing, but it will be much more useful once they've actually built something and have some experience to write about. Also he might want to find an English major to help him spruce up the verbage, if he wants to meaningfully share his experience. So I wish them luck but nothing for us just yet. Pete St.John (talk) 20:53, 17 January 2008 (UTC) hehe —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.144.158.86 (talk) 17:38, 13 March 2008 (UTC)