The Bladed Beowulf: A Cost-Effective Alternative to Traditional Beowulfs

We present a new twist to the Beowulf cluster — the Bladed Beowulf. In contrast to traditional Beowulfs which typically use Intel or AMD processors, our Bladed Beowulf uses Transmeta processors in order to keep thermal power dissipation low and reliability and density high while still achieving comparable performance to Inteland AMD-based clusters. Given the ever increasing complexity of traditional supercomputers and Beowulf clusters; the issues of size, reliability, power consumption, and ease of administration and use will be “the” issues of this decade for high-performance computing. Bigger and faster machines are simply not good enough anymore. To illustrate, we present the results of performance benchmarks on our Bladed Beowulf and introduce two performance metrics that contribute to the total cost of ownership (TCO) of a computing system — performance/power and performance/space.