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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 capable of running Linux, standard Ethernet adapters, and switches. It does not contain
any custom hardware components and 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 gateway to the outside world.
Beowulf is not a special software package, new network topology or the latest kernel hack.
Beowulf is a technology of clustering Linux computers to form a parallel, virtual supercomputer.
Although there are many software packages such as kernel modifications, PVM and MPI libraries,
and configuration tools which make the Beowulf architecture faster, easier to configure, and much
more usable, one can build a Beowulf class machine using standard Linux distribution without any
additional software.
BEOWULF PROJECT AT ON 2.1
Beowulf project at the molecular photophysics group takes its beginning in 2001 when A. Sobolewski and coworkers built the first claster.
Now it has 8 compute nodes.
Six of them are machines with 700 Mhz Pentium III, 256 MB RAM, 30 GB EIDE disk, and 10 Mb/s Ethernet adapter.
The other two are extended with 800 Mhz Pentium III, 512 MB RAM and 40 GB EIDE disk. In addition two disks on the
front-end comoputer are joined in ATA RAID by using the FastTrak TX2000 controller. The claster is running with RedHat Linux 7.3
operating system and uses MPICH 1.2.4 for message passing. Gnu C, C++ and FORTRAN (g77) compilers are installed. And we use GAMESS
for ab initio calculations.
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