[Beowulf] Win64 Clusters!!!!!!!!!!!!

Peter St. John peter.st.john at gmail.com
Mon Apr 2 13:15:05 PDT 2007


If you'd like to keep the history of Beowulfry straight for the coming
generation, I urge someone to fix up the reference to "Thomas L Sterling" in
the Wikipedia article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf_%28computing%29 ;
apparently there are two Thomas Sterling's, and the article had had a link
to the wrong one, so now there is no link.

If you click on the "broken" link (to his name, in the article), it puts you
in the editor to create the page (if none exists still, when you do this).
Then a minimal article would just be:

== Thomas Sterling ==
Co-author of the seminal work "How to Build a Beowulf" regarding
[[Beowulf_%28computing%29| Beowulf]] strategy of cost-effective
high-performance computing with commodity hardware and open-source software.

That's it. Drop me a line if I can help in any way. I'm sure lot's of you
could do great justice to this individual; though I spent hours doing the
mindlessly-wiki-compliant article for the late mathematician Leonard Carlitz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Carlitz . Just publishing a book is
plenty "notability" to satisfy the wiki standards; here you have a whole
mailing list of rocket scientists to back you up.

Peter
"Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not
learn meta-history are doomed to have it reinvented on their heads." --
Euphistopheles


On 4/2/07, Douglas Eadline <deadline at clustermonkey.net> wrote:
>
> > On Mon, Apr 02, 2007 at 12:12:29PM -0400, Douglas Eadline wrote:
> >> > Hi All,
> >> >
> >> > Would any of you please like to share usage-experience/views/comments
> >> > about Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 based Beowulf Clusters?
> >>
> >> As a point of clarification, there is no such thing
> >> as a "Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 based Beowulf Clusters"
> >> This link may help:
> >>
> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf_cluster
> >>
> >
> > I don't know why everyone is so obsessed with saying "Your Beowulf must
> > run
> > an (F)OSS operating system to be a Beowulf."
>
> Because I believe, "the art of Beowulf" has a rich history of development
> that is based on the original definition from "How to Build a Beowulf" by
> Thomas Sterling, John Salmon, Donald J. Becker and Daniel F. Savarese:
>
> ".. a collection of personal computers interconnected
> by widely available networking technology running anyone of several
> open source Unix-like operating systems. "
>
> I would not want to see it usurped by other clustering efforts.
> I believe that if we do not protect against revisionist history, then
> all of a sudden WCCS is now "Beowulf" computing. Such things, in my
> opinion dis-honor all the people (who I respect) that have contributed
> to this community. To me it is almost akin to removing author credit
> in open source software.
>
> A short aside. I overheard a conversation at SC-2000 about
> the origin of Beowulf from a MS representative "Beowulf
> was a copy of the Microsoft Wolfpack software. They chose
> that name so it would seem like Wolfpack some how".
> Truth is a slippery fish.
>
> Certainly Thomas Sterling can rework the definition as he pleases
> (he co-authored it), And I am not disparaging WCCS or
> any other clustering method. I just want to keep the credit
> where credit is due.
>
> So I stand as a defender of the faith, as it where.
>
> --
> Doug
>
> >
> > You can build a Beowulf out of Windows. God only knows why you'd want
> to,
> > but
> > you can.
> >
> > Just to invent a little bit of evidence, Thomas Sterling edited a book
> > called "Beowulf Cluster Computing with Windows"
> >
> >
> http://www.amazon.com/Beowulf-Computing-Scientific-Engineering-Computation/dp/0262692759/ref=pd_sim_b_5/002-1371173-4594458?ie=UTF8&qid=1175531228&sr=8-1
> >
> > It was actually two books - a "Beowulf Cluster Computing with Linux" and
> a
> > "Beowulf Cluster Computing with Windows". 75% of the text was the same.
> > (We
> > wrote a chapter in it - we used the same chapter, with latex macros
> > \iflinux
> > and \ifwinnt for whichever book was being built)
> >
> > The Linux book way outsold the Windows book, and so there was no second
> > edition of the Windows book. My guess is that most everyone had the good
> > sense to say "Windows as the base OS for my cluster? No thanks"
> >
> >
> >> >
> >> > What in your opinion is the future of such clusters?
> >> >
> >> > How you compare these with the LINUX CLUSTERS?
> >>
> >> You will not find much information on this list as
> >> it mainly focuses on Linux Beowulf style clusters.
> >>
> >
> > The parallel programming part of this list applies to Windows as
> > much as it applies to Linux (or FreeBSD or Darwin or HURD)
> >
> > -Erik
> >
> >
> > !DSPAM:46113337114068298414181!
> >
>
>
> --
> Doug
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