BEOWULF: A Parallel Workstation for Scientific Computation

{ Network-of-Workstations technology is applied to the challenge of implementing very high performance workstations for Earth and space science applications. The Beowulf parallel workstation employs 16 PC-based processing modules integrated with multiple Ether-net networks. Large disk capacity and high disk to memory bandwidth is achieved through the use of a hard disk and controller for each processing module supporting up to 16 way concurrent accesses. The paper presents results from a series of experiments that measure the scaling characteristics of Beowulf in terms of communication bandwidth, le transfer rates, and processing performance. The evaluation includes a computational uid dynamics code and an N-body gravitational simulation program. It is shown that the Beowulf architecture provides a new operating point in performance to cost for high performance workstations, especially for le transfers under favorable conditions.