Beowulf vs Extreme Linux

[Jacek Radajewski]

Hi All,

Here is a good one for you.  What is the difference between Beowulf and
Extreme Linux.  Since Beowulf is about commodity software, any OS with
freely available source code could be a platform for a Beowulf system.
Extreme Linux on the other hand is Linux specific,  Red Hat Linux
specific.  The question is "are there any other differences ?".  Some
people say that Extreme Linux is much more than Beowulf.  They say that
Extreme Linux is about doing extreme things with Linux, which could be
almost anything.  Sounds reasonable to me, but what do you think ?

Below is a definition of Beowulf from the Beowulf HOWTO.  Does this
apply to extreme Linux ?  Please comment.

Cheers

Jacek

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Beowulf is a multi computer architecture which can be used for parallel
computations. It is a system which usually consists of one server node,
and one or more client nodes connected
together via Ethernet or some other network. It is a system built using
commodity hardware components, like any PC which is capable of running
Linux, standard Ethernet adaptors, and
switches. It does not contain any custom hardware components and it is
trivially reproducible. Beowulf also uses commodity software like the
Linux operating system, Parallel Virtual
Machine (PVM) and Message Passing Interface (MPI). The server node
controls the whole cluster and serves files to the client nodes. It is
also the cluster's console and the gateway to
the outside world. Client nodes in a Beowulf system are dumb, the dumber
the better. Nodes are configured and controlled by the server node, and
do only what they are told to. In a
disk-less client configuration, client nodes don't even know their IP
address or name until the server tells them what it is. One of the main
differences between Beowulf and Cluster of
Workstations is the fact that Beowulf nodes are not workstations.
Beowulf nodes can be though of as a CPU + memory package which can be
plugged in to the cluster at any time with
almost zero configuration.

Beowulf is not a special software package, new network topology or the
latest kernel hack. Beowulf is an architecture of networked Linux
machines. Although there are many software
packages like kernel modifications, PVM and MPI libraries, and
configuration tools which make the Beowulf architecture faster, easier
to configure, and much more useable, one can build
a Beowulf class machine using standard Linux distribution without any
additional software. If you have two networked Linux computers which
share at least the /home file system via
NFS, and trust each other to execute remote shells (rsh), then you have
a simple, two node Beowulf machine.