CRUNCHING DATA WITH CLUSTERS
ELIZABETH K. WILSON · Chemical & Engineering News · 2000
You're a chemist with a meaty computational problem to solve. But you can't get any time on the already overloaded supercomputing facilities at your university, and you certainly can't afford to buy a supercomputer on your limited budget What do you do? A growing number of scientists say they have the answer: Gather together a few inexpensive personal computers, hook them together, and voila!—you have your very own supercomputer. Known popularly as Beowulf-class clusters, these groups of linked, off-the-shelf computers are taking the scientific world by storm. Costing mere tens of thousands of dollars, computer clusters are capable of performing high-speed, complex calculations and simulations, frequently on par or even better than their more expensive supercomputing cousins. "This is something a poor assistant professor like me can afford," says Cristoph Dellago, a theoretical chemist at the University of Rochester, whose group's recently constructed cluster cost. What's more, when you build a cluster, it's all yours. "One ...