An evaluation of the system performance of a beowulf cluster
Karl-Johan Andersson, Daniel Aronsson, Patrick Karlsson · 2001
To make accurate predictions of which type of computational problems that are suitable to solve on a beowulf-cluster, one needs to measure the performance of the system. A beowulfcluster can be a very good alternative too a specialized supercomputer, especially when it comes to the price performance ratio. A beowulf-cluster is a number of commodity off-theshelf PC’s connected through some sort of network. All basic software needed to configure a cluster, and for compiling and running parallel applications on it, can be found free of charge on the Internet. We have configured and tested a 16-node beowulf-cluster for the Department of Scientific Computing at Uppsala University, and the National Supercomputer Centre at Linkoping, both in Sweden. We have tested both hardware and software for comparative purposes with other systems, and also for identifying characteristics of the system. Our results show that the system is well adopted for the type of computational jobs that the Department of Scientific Computing intend to run on the system. The tests also showed us that if the system is upgraded in the future, the course of action should be in the following order: Larger main memories on the nodes, faster interconnect and finally if the computational power is too low, faster processors.