Beowulfs Go to Sea

As the size of crews continues to be reduced on modern warships, and at the same time the complexity of the tasks that warships have to handle continues to increase, the amount of computing power aboard a warship will have to increase dramatically. One of the most cost-effective ways of creating supercomputers is to cluster inexpensive off-theshelf commodity computers so that they act as a single computer. Such a cluster is often referred to as a Beowulf cluster. We anticipate that Beowulf clusters will become commonplace features of the warships of the future. In addition, warships will be populated with many specialized intelligent devices and sensors. We discuss some of the key issues involved in successfully taking Beowulf clusters to sea. Of special interest are the questions of how to best design ships for accommodating Beowulf clusters and how to build Beowulf clusters that are well suited for the battlefield environment and which can survive significant battle damage without losing all functionality. Lastly, we discuss how to use Beowulf clusters to provide a basis for supporting the intelligent behavior that we will need in the ships of the future.