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The Beowulf Project

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News

Vist the new Top Cluster List site.

The TopClusters site is affiliated with the IEEE Task Force on Cluster Computing (TFCC).

Other sites to check on a regular basis:

A mirror site in Europe

The Beowulf Project History

The Beowulf Project was started by Donald Becker when he moved to CESDIS in early 1994. CESDIS was located at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and was operated for NASA by USRA.

In the summer of 1994 the first Beowulf 16 node demonstration cluster was constructed for the Earth and Space Sciences project, (ESS). The project quickly spread to other NASA sites, other R&D labs and to universities around the world. The project's scope and the number of Beowulf installations have grown over the years.

The Beowulf Project is now hosted by Scyld Computing Corporation, which was founded by members of the original Beowulf team with a mission to develop and support Beowulf systems in the larger commercial arena.

This Web-site attempts to provide an introduction to the Beowulf project and a distribution mechanism for contributions.

Introduction and Overview
This contains an introduction and overview of the Beowulf Project: history, goals, philosophies and observations.
Beowulf Networking Drivers
One of the keys to the development of Beowulf clusters is the availablity of affordable, high performance networks to serve as "back planes" for the cluster. The continued development of network drivers for Linux is one of the primary foci Scyld's efforts.
Beowulf Software
The Beowulf software environment is implemented as an add-ons to commercially available, royalty-free base Linux distributions. This page is distribution point for this software.
Mailing List Archives
This archive of the Beowulf related mailing lists is good place to catch up on previous discussions. The following archives are available on this site.

You may use Scyld's search page to search these archives and other archives hosted by Scyld.

A search-able archive is also available at Supercomputer.org's Website.

For information on the mailing lists hosts here please see our mailing list information page. You will find a list of lists there as well as information about how to subscribe and unsubscribe.

The Original Beowulf Hardware at GSFC
A brief description of original Beowulf clusters at the Goddard Space Flight Center (of historical interest only).
How to Build a Beowulf
Beowulf Papers and Presentations
A short collection of journal and conference paper along with overhead slides from various presentations.

Other Beowulf Sites:

Here is a partial list of other sites that are working on Beowulf Related Projects:

If you have a webpage about your cluster and you would like to have it added to this list, send mail to Phil Merkey.

Cluster Related Projects:

Commercial Beowulf sites:

Part of the Beowulf philosophy is that all system software required to construct and operate a Beowulf be publicly available and all the hardware should be COTS hardware. However, this does not mean that we are against the idea of buying software nor against the idea of buying assembled hardware. In particular, many of our ESS scientists look to vendors for their support of Fortran 77 and Fortran 90. There are number of commerical sites that offer these and other products or services of interest to the Beowulf community. We offer these pointers at the request of these vendors for your convenience.

If you would like to have pointer to your product or service added to this list, send mail to Phil Merkey.

Contact: Donald Becker becker@scyld.com and Phil Merkey merk@cs.mtu.edu
Page last modified: Fri Apr 27 14:32:30 EDT 2001