[Beowulf] Computer on a stick

Daniel Pfenniger Daniel.Pfenniger at unige.ch
Wed Feb 29 00:10:55 PST 2012


Christopher Samuel a écrit :
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> On 29/02/12 02:36, Hearns, John wrote:
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>> What was the spec of the original Beowulf project nodes?
>
> Their paper says:
>
> http://egscbeowulf.er.usgs.gov/geninfo/Beowulf-ICPP95.pdf
>

Thanks for the link.  In the article, and before the hardware specs is
aptly mentioned the then very young Linux operating system:

"The Beowulf parallel workstation project is driven by a set of requirements
for high performance scientific workstations in the Earth and space sciences
community and the opportunity of low cost computing made available through
the PC related mass market of commodity subsystems. This opportunity is also
facilitated by the availability of the Linux operating system, a robust 
Unix-like system environment with source code that is targeted for the x86
family of microprocessors including the Intel Pentium."

It is well this combination of commodity standardized hardware (computer,
mass storage, and network) and freely tunable software which allowed the project 
to flourish.

	Dan




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