Beowulf Parallel Processing for Dynamic Load-balancing12

1 0-7803-5846-5/00/$10.00 © 2000 IEEE 2 Updated August 31, 1999 Abstract—The Beowulf parallel-processing architecture is a public-domain software technology developed by NASA to link commercial off the shelf (COTS) processors yielding super-computer performance (10 Gflops) very economically (under $150K). It has been used for applications as diverse as scalable hierarchical particle algorithms for galaxy formation and accretion astrophysics, phase transitions in the early universe and their analogues in the laboratory, and data analysis from the spacecraft in the Solar-Terrestrial Probe Line. Beowulf clusters have been ranked among the top 125 world-class supercomputers. Beowulf runs on a variety of platforms (workstations, Win-tel PCs, Macintosh) and a variety of generations of hardware. It has been successfully demonstrated for heterogeneous parallel processing with hundreds of diverse platforms.