Beowulf: Harnessing the Power of Parallelism in a Pile-of-PCs

| The rapid increase in performance of mass market commodity microprocessors and signiicant disparity in pricing between PCs and scientiic 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 scien-tiic 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 method-ologies to apply these low cost system conng-urations to NASA computational requirements in the Earth and space sciences. Recently, a 16 processor Beowulf costing less than $50,000 sustained 1.25 Gigaaops on a gravitational N-body simulation of 10 million particles with a Tree code algorithm using standard commodity hardware and software components. This paper describes the technologies and method-ologies employed to achieve this breakthrough. Both opportunities aaorded 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 .