How to Build a Beowulf: A Guide to the Implementation and Application of PC Clusters (Scientific and Engineering Computation) (Cellular and Molecular Neuropharmacology) - Softcover

Savarese, Daniel F.; Becker, Donald J.; Salmon, John; Sterling, Thomas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 026269218X ISBN 13: 9780262692182

Publisher: MIT Press, 1999

Synopsis

This how-to guide provides step-by-step instructions for building aBeowulf-type computer, including the physical elements that make up aclustered PC computing system, the software required (most of which isfreely available), and insights on how to organize the code to exploitparallelism.

About this title

Review:

How to Build a Beowulf covers the essentials of today's "cheap supercomputing" that is available with off-the-shelf PC hardware running Linux. Filled with advice from the experts, this book is a working guide to the essentials of planning, installing, and running a Beowulf cluster.

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

About the Author:

Donald J. Becker is Staff Scientist at the Center for Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences.

John Salmon is Staff Scientist at the California Institute of Technology.

Daniel F. Savarese is the founder of Savarese Software Research. He founded ORO, was a senior scientist at Caltech's Center for Advanced Computing Research, and worked as vice president of software development for WebOS.

Thomas Sterling is a Professor of Computer Science at Louisiana State University, a Faculty Associate at California Institute of Technology, and a Distinguished Visiting Scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

William Gropp is Director of the Parallel Computing Institute and Thomas M. Siebel Chair in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

About this edition

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 026269218X
• ISBN 13: 9780262692182
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 262