[Beowulf] About Beowulf in general

[Douglas Eadline, Cluster World Magazine]

On Thu, 22 Jul 2004, Jack C wrote:

> Hello all,
> 
> I have been using linux for a while, and decided it quite time to check out
> beowulf. So I've read the FAQ, and ALL of the sites therein. I havent
> comprehended it all completely yet, but it seems to me that beowulf is simply
> a name for a certain configuration of a bunch of different packages. Is that
> correct? In all of the setups and how-to's, they talk about networking, nfs,
> pvm, things like that, and I don't recal a "beowulf source" or package. So,
> my question is, why does this particular configuration have such a nice name?


Beowulf is more of a concept than a project. It was the original 
name for the project that Tom Sterling and Don Becker were working on
at CESDIS at NASA. Check out this story: 
http://www.linux-mag.com/2003-06/breakthroughs_01.html for the history.

I think the best definition was given in the original book

.. a collection of person computers interconnected by widely available 
networking technology ruining anyone of several open source Unix-like 
operating systems. 

>From "How to Build a Beowulf"

In my opinion, Beowulf and in more general terms Cluster Computing is
about building/optimizing  machines around problems and not problems 
around machines.
 
Doug

> 
> Thanks, and sorry if I've overlooked something,
> 
> -Jack C
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