How to Build a Beowulf: A Guide to the Implementation and Application of PC Clusters [Paperback]

After an introduction to Beowulf and parallel computing in general, the authors describe the advantages to and organization of a typical Beowulf setup. They next describe the basic PC hardware (which will be familiar to many Intel users). The do-it-yourself impulse in Beowulf supercomputing is strong, and the authors show how to choose everything from a CPU and memory to networking options (including TCP/IP basics and Fast Ethernet). They cover hardware and software installation and the basics of configuring Linux on Beowulf nodes (which do the work of parallel processing).

Next the book covers issues of security and system administration of a Beowulf cluster. (Here the authors strike a balance between accessibility and security with the concept of a "guarded Beowulf.") They cover a variety of Linux utilities for remote computing and administration.

An essential piece of Beowulf technology is the Message Passing Interface (MPI), a set of APIs that permit programmers to develop parallel programs in C/C++ and FORTRAN. With MPI, programs running on different CPUs can pass messages and share the same data. The samples that round out this book are excellent--a ray-tracing example, a parallel sorting algorithm, and a cellular automata program. The authors do a good job of explaining the issues of taking advantage of parallelism within Beowulf software. --Richard Dragan

Supercomputing research--the goal of which is to make computers that are ever faster and more powerful--has been at the cutting edge of computer technology since the early 1960s. Until recently, research cost in the millions of dollars, and many of the companies that originally made supercomputers are now out of business.The early supercomputers used distributed computing and parallel processing to link processors together in a single machine, often called a mainframe. Exploiting the same technology, researchers are now using off-the-shelf PCs to produce computers with supercomputer performance. It is now possible to make a supercomputer for less than $40,000. Given this new affordability, a number of universities and research laboratories are experimenting with installing such Beowulf-type systems in their facilities.This how-to guide provides step-by-step instructions for building a Beowulf-type computer, including the physical elements that make up a clustered PC computing system, the software required (most of which is freely available), and insights on how to organize the code to exploit parallelism. The book also includes a list of potential pitfalls.