Scaling of Beowulf-class Distributed Systems
John K. Salmon, Christopher Stein, Thomas Sterling · 1998
Beowulf-class systems employ inexpensive commodity processors, open source operating systems and communication libraries and commodity networking hardware to deliver supercomputer performance at the lowest possible price. Small to medium sized Beowulf systems are installed or planned at dozens of universities, laboratories and industrial sites around the world. The design space for larger systems, however, is largely unexplored. We investigate two interconnection techniques that would allow the scaling of a Beowulf class system to unprecedented sizes (hundreds or thousands of processors). The first is a commercially available high-speed backplane with fast-ethernet and gigabit ethernet switch modules. The second is a network that combines point-to-point connections and commodity switches, employing the Beowulf nodes as IP routers as well as computational engines. The first method has the drawback of a relatively high price tag - a significant but not overwhelming fraction of the cost ...