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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. The name ''Beowulf'' originally referred to a specific computer built in 1994 by Thomas Sterling and Donald Becker at NASA.〔 Becker, Donald J and Sterling, Thomas and Savarese, Daniel and Dorband, John E and Ranawak, Udaya A and Packer, Charles V, "BEOWULF: A parallel workstation for scientific computation", in Proceedings, International Conference on Parallel Processing vol. 95, (1995). URL http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/brahma/Resources/beowulf/papers/ICPP95/icpp95.html 〕 The name "Beowulf" comes from the main character in the Old English epic poem ''Beowulf'', which Sterling chose because the poem describes its eponymous hero as having "thirty men's heft of grasp in the gripe of his hand".〔 See Francis Barton Gummere's 1909 translation, reprinted (for example) in 〕 No particular piece of software defines a cluster as a Beowulf. Beowulf clusters normally run a Unix-like operating system, such as BSD, Linux, or Solaris, normally built from free and open source software. Commonly used parallel processing libraries include Message Passing Interface (MPI) and Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM). Both of these permit the programmer to divide a task among a group of networked computers, and collect the results of processing. Examples of MPI software include OpenMPI or MPICH. There are additional MPI implementations available. Beowulf systems operate worldwide, chiefly in support of scientific computing. == Development == A description of the Beowulf cluster, from the original "how-to", which was published by Jacek Radajewski and Douglas Eadline under the Linux Documentation Project in 1998. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Beowulf cluster」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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