How to Build a Beowulf: A Guide to the Implementation and...

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 261 pages
• Published by: The MIT Press May 28, 1999
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 026269218X
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0262692182
• Book Dimensions: 9 x 8 x 0.7 inches
• Weighs: 1.4 pounds

Product 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

Product Description
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 Until recently, research cost in the millions of dollars, and many of the companies that originally made supercomputers are now out of business.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.

Reader Reviews
I must take issue with some of the other reviewers of this text. I found this book to be a very good overview (and snapshot) of the current status of a rapidly evolving system architecture. It is written at a fairly high level (although it does dip periodically into details) - so the reader gets a good overview of what a Beowulf is, its' components, and many of the issues involved in designing and implementing one. In my view it balances detail and theory quite well. IT IS NOT (nor do I believe it was intended as) a detailed roadmap of EXACTLY how to build one. The Beowulf architecture isn't so much a single type of implementation, but rather an approach to applying COTS technology to solving computational problems. The details of any single Beowulf implementation depend greatly on the specific computational problem being attacked. (Something that is pointed-out within the book.) The authors therefore took a different approach. Some of the topics covered in the book WILL, eventually, be outdated: specifically, the section on the PCI bus, some of the material on network technology, and the section on available processors. As COTS technology advances, and as Beowulf architectures change to take advantage of those advances, some sections will become outdated. However, this is unavoidable for any text reviewing the current state-of-the-art. There is also a lot more here that is NOT likely to be outdated within the next several years.. There may also be sections in the text that the reader will already be familiar with, and can therefore skip. This is also inevitable considering the nature of the text and will obviously vary depending on the reader. I can recomend this text highly as a starting point in learning what a Beowulf is, some of the ways they are put together, and for exploring many important design and implementation decisions. In my own case, it helped me resolve a number of design issues I was wrestling with about my own system. It does not, however, stand alone. After starting with this text, most readers will then certainly need to refer to online sources for further information. Comment | | (Report this)