Beowulf clusters

• commodity-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware

  • nodes are usually standard desktop PCs
  • good performance CPUs
  • network: Fast/Giga Ethernet, Myrinet, SCI
  • disk: EIDE, SCSI

• free/open source software

  • Linux as operating system (or FreeBSD)
  • parallel communication software (MPI, PVM)
  • parallel numerical software

• for massive computational requirements