Hardware virtualization in the x86 architecture has enabled the use of virtual machine monitors in Beowulf clusters. In turn, each application user can then run a virtual guest operating system of his/her choice. Of course virtualizing and sharing the hardware resources in a Beowulf cluster will add additional overheads that may negatively effect performance of the application. However, the use...

Network-of-Workstations (NOW) seek to leverage commercial workstation technology to produce high performance computing systems at costs appreciably lower than parallel computers speciically designed for that purpose. The capabilities of technologies emerging from the PC commodity mass market are rapidly evolving to converge with those of workstations while at signiicantly lower cost. A new oper...

This paper discusses how to decrease and stabilize network latency in a Beowulf system. Having low latency is particularly important to reduce execution time of High Performance Computing applications. Optimization opportunities are identified and analyzed over the different system components that are integrated in compute nodes, including device drivers, operating system services and kernel pa...