10 Years of Beowulf Clustering

Quirk writes "Wired News has a blurb celebrating the 10th birthday of the Beowulf cluster. Attendees recalled the initial fear and loathing the Beowulf project had to overcome. The Beowulf project takes its name from an epic poem penned circa 1000 A.D."

Comments

Finally!!

[kb9vcr]

I was just thinking, we never talk about beowolf custers anymore!!

I wonder, can we beowolf custer a beowulf cluster?! ;)

Re:Finally!!

[samhalliday]

You might be interested in grid computing, in which a group of academics with heads too big for their common good

you seem to have overlooked the fact that these people are indeed academics... the people who push boundaries and bring about new ways of doing things. grid computing isn't working now, but when the technology is in place for it, it will be revolutionary. these kind of ideas don't work first time round, and certainly don't fix themselves overnight.

your ignorance to the sheer amount of information processing which will be required by, for example the new generation of projects at CERN, is perhaps the reason why you do not see the need for grid computing.

I once watched some of this process in motion, which helped to smack down a far more sensical and quite impressive machine proposal, and found the whole thing to be entirely retarded.

that is no fault of grid computing... the blame must be placed upon the persons who chose the wrong solution. grid computing is nowhere near ready to be used. the only people who should be playign with it should be people who wish to aid the current research. it is equivalent to running a beta kernel with debian unstable on a production server. if they had work to be done, then a cluster would have been a more sensible option.

Re:Sad

[Daniel Dvorkin]

[shrug] Different standards for ignorance; most people would recognize the origin of the name*, but wouldn't have any idea what a B. cluster is. And by /. standards, that's igorance. I'm a believer in the "one culture," myself -- if you don't recognize either, there's a serious gap in your knowledge.

*I may be giving "most people" too much credit, of course.

epic versus clustering

[danny]

The top result on a Google search for "beowulf" is about clustering, but 8 of the top 10 are about the epic. And I doubt there'll ever be nearly as many books and articles written about the clustering system as about the poem.

Danny.