Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Can You Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of These?

Posted by michael on from the okay,-it's-a-bad-joke dept.

Hell O'World writes: "Scientific American has a story on the history of Beowulf Clusters. It's written by the guys who built the Stone SouperComputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory." Nice example of how old hardware can be put to use to make new breakthroughs. Nothing radically new, but hey, it's 4AM Saturday morning, what do you expect. :)

3 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. I like the incremental upgrades by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4

    The incremental upgrades that they do are pretty slick. The StoneSouper is a heterogeneous cluster. Each hour the machines do a speed analysis on themselves to track their performance, then when new equipment comes in, they know which nodes to replace. Makes sense because at some point in time the electricity used by the slower nodes becomes very costly in relation to the amount of work contributed to the cluster as a whole. It is real slick, and as they point out, the cluster is always improving. It becomes better and better over time, unlike some conventional supercomputers which slowly lose their value over time.

  2. 4 AM Saturday morning as opposed to... by Katravax · · Score: 4

    4 AM Saturday afternoon? :)

  3. s/beowulfcluster/cluster by green+pizza · · Score: 4

    For the 6.022x10^23rd time, not all clusters are "Beowulf Clusters".