[Beowulf] Beowulf communication type of nodes

[Douglas Eadline]

Nathan

A Beowulf cluster is more of a philosophy than a specification. However,
in the book “How to Build a Beowulf” by Thomas Sterling, John Salmon,
Donald J. Becker and Daniel F. Savarese, the following definition was
given for a Beowulf cluster:

".. a collection of personal computers interconnected by widely available
networking technology running anyone of several open source Unix-like
operating systems. "

Of course "personal computers" is now servers, but the rest of the
definition is pretty broad and still true. The windows part may not
pass the official rules, but this list seems to be about exploring
ways of HPC using commodity (and not so commodity) hardware and
software in an open fashion.


--
Doug


> Could one consider a cluster a beowulf if the nodes obtained their
> instructions from a hard drive, in a specific location? Or would this be
> another type of cluster? I have a shared drive, and the master node doles
> out DLL Libraries (Yes, it's neccisary the system be on windows XP) to the
> slave nodes, which execute functions in the DLLs. The results are returned
> as files.
> Thanks!
> Nathan
>
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--
Doug

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