Beowulf Cluster Computing with Linux 2e (Scientific and Engineering Computation) - Softcover

Gropp, William; Sterling, Thomas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262692929 ISBN 13: 9780262692922

Publisher: MIT Press, 2004

Synopsis

The completely updated second edition of a guide to Beowulf cluster computing. Use of Beowulf clusters (collections of off-the-shelf commodity computers programmed to act in concert, resulting in supercomputer performance at a fraction of the cost) has spread far and wide in the computational science community. Many application groups are assembling and operating their own "private supercomputers" rather than relying on centralized computing centers. Such clusters are used in climate modeling, computational biology, astrophysics, and materials science, as well as non-traditional areas such as financial modeling and entertainment. Much of this new popularity can be attributed to the growth of the open-source movement.The second edition of Beowulf Cluster Computing with Linux has been completely updated; all three stand-alone sections have important new material. The introductory material in the first part now includes a new chapter giving an overview of the book and background on cluster-specific issues, including why and how to choose a cluster, as well as new chapters on cluster initialization systems (including ROCKS and OSCAR) and on network setup and tuning. The information on parallel programming in the second part now includes chapters on basic parallel programming and available libraries and programs for clusters. The third and largest part of the book, which describes software infrastructure and tools for managing cluster resources, has new material on cluster management and on the Scyld system.

About this title

Synopsis

Use of Beowulf clusters (collections of off-the-shelf commodity computers programmed to act in concert, resulting in supercomputer performance at a fraction of the cost) has spread far and wide in the computational science community. Many application groups are assembling and operating their own "private supercomputers" rather than relying on certalized computing centres. Such clusters are used in climate modelling, computational biology, astrophysics and material science, as well as non-traditional areas such as financial modelling and entertainment. Much of this new popularity can be attributed to the growth of the open-source movement. This second edition of this text has been completely updated; all three stand-alone sections have new material. The introductory material in the first part now includes a new chapter giving an overview of the book and background on cluster-specific issues, including why and how to choose a cluster, as well as new chapters on cluster initialization systems (including ROCKS and OSCAR) and on network setup and tuning.

The information on parallel programming in the second part now includes chapters on basic parallel programming and available libraries and programs for clusters. The third and largest part of the book, which describes software infrastructure and tools for managing cluster resources, has new material on cluster management and on the Scyld system.

About the Author

William Gropp is Director of the Parallel Computing Institute and Thomas M. Siebel Chair in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Ewing Lusk is Argonne Distinguished Fellow Emeritus at Argonne National Laboratory. Thomas Sterling is a Professor of Computer Science at Louisiana State University, a Faculty Associate at California Institute of Technology, and a Distinguished Visiting Scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Edition details

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0262692929
• ISBN 13: 9780262692922
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 504