X-Nico

4 unusual facts about Beowulf cluster


Anant Agarwal

Alewife (multiprocessor), a project led by Agarwal at MIT that was a predecessor to the Beowulf cluster.

Beowulf cluster

The name "Beowulf" comes from the main character in the Old English epic poem Beowulf, which Sterling bestowed because the poem describes its eponymous hero as having "thirty men's heft of grasp in the gripe of his hand".

The name Beowulf originally referred to a specific computer built in 1994 by Thomas Sterling and Donald Becker at NASA.

Dissipative particle dynamics

In principle, simulations of very large systems, approaching a cubic micron for milliseconds, are possible using a parallel implementation of DPD running on multiple processors in a Beowulf-style cluster.



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