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 The original Beowulf cluster built in 1994 by Thomas Sterling and Donald Becker at NASA. The cluster comprises 16 white box desktops each running a i486 DX4 processor clocked at 100 MHz, each containing a 500 MB hard disk drive, and each having 16 MB of RAM between them, leading to a total of roughly 8 GB of fixed disk storage and 256 MB of RAM shared within the cluster and a performance benchmark of 500 MFLOPS. |
A Beowulf cluster is a computer cluster of what are normally identical, commodity-grade computers networked into a small local area network with libraries and programs installed which allow processing to be shared among them. The result is a high-performance parallel computing cluster from inexpensive personal computer hardware.