| Beowulf Software - Beowulf cluster computer
software The Beowulf software
environment is implemented as
an add-on to commercially
available, royalty-free base
Linux distributions. These
distributions include all of
the software needed for a
networked workstation: the
kernel, Linux utilities, the
GNU software suite, and many
add-on packages. Initially we
used the very popular
Slackware distribution. We
have now migrated to the
RedHat distribution with its
better package management and
upgrade system. The Beowulf
distribution includes several
programming environments (all
developed elsewhere) and
development libraries as
individually installable
packages. PVM, MPI, and BSP
are all available.
SYS-V--style IPC and p-threads
are also supported. A
considerable amount of work
has gone into improving the
network subsystem of the
kernel and implementing fast
network device support. Most
of these changes have been
incorporated into the kernel
source code tree, although
many device driver updates are
still in the active
development or tuning phase.
In the Beowulf scheme, as is
common in NOW clusters, every
node is responsible for
running its own copy of the
kernel and nodes are generally
sovereign and autonomous at
the kernel level. However, in
the interests of presenting a
more uniform system image to
both users and applications,
we have extended the Linux
kernel to allow a loose
ensemble of nodes to
participate in a number of
global namespaces. A guiding
principle of these extensions
is to have little increase in
the kernel size or complexity
and, most importantly,
negligible impact on the
individual processor
performance. |
Beowulf Software
