Beowulf: harnessing the power of parallelism in a pile-of-PCs

The rapid increase in performance of mass market commodity microprocessors and significant disparity in pricing between PCs and scientific workstations has provided an opportunity for substantial gains in performance to cost by harnessing PC technology in parallel ensembles to provide high end capability for scientific and engineering applications. The Beowulf project is a NASA initiative sponsored by the HPCC program to explore the potential of Pile-of-PCs and to develop the necessary methodologies to apply these low cost system configurations to NASA computational requirements in the Earth and space sciences. This paper describes the technologies and methodologies employed to achieve the increased performance of PCs. Both opportunities afforded by this approach and the challenges confronting its application to real-world problems are discussed in the framework of hardware and software systems as well as the results from benchmarking experiments. Finally, near term technology trends and future directions of the Pile-of-PCs concept are considered.