Contents

• • • License Terms for ``Engineering a Beowulf-style Compute Cluster''
      • General Terms
      • The ``Beverage'' Modification to the OPL
      • OPEN PUBLICATION LICENSE Draft v0.4, 8 June 1999
    • Preface
  
  
• Introduction and Overview
  • Introduction
    • What's a Beowulf?
    • What's a Beowulf Good For?
    • Historical Perspective and Religious Homage
  • Overview of Beowulf Design
    • Beowulf Design Protocol
      • Task Profiling and Analysis
      • Parallelizing your Code
      • Building Price and Performance Tables
    • Protocol Summary
  • Organization of this Book
  
  
• Parallel Programs
  • Estimating the Speedup: Amdahl's Law
    • Amdahl's Law
    • Better Estimates for the Speedup
    • Visualizing the Performance Scaling
  • Bottlenecks
  • IPC's, Granularity and Barriers
    • Shared Networks
    • Switched Networks
  • Profiling
  • Specific Parallel Models
    • Embarrassingly Parallel Computations
      • The Network is the Computer: MOSIX
      • Batch Systems with a Heart: Condor
      • Master-Slave Calculations
    • Lattice Models
    • Long Range Models
  
  
• Beowulf Hardware
  • Node Hardware
    • Rates, Latencies and Bandwidths
      • Microbenchmarking Tools
      • Lmbench Results
      • Netperf Results
      • CPU Results
    • Conclusions
  • Network Hardware
    • Basic Networking 101
      • Networking Concepts
      • TCP/IP
    • Ethernet
      • 10 Mbps Ethernet
      • 100 Mbps Ethernet
      • 1000 Mbps Ethernet
    • The Dolphin Serial Channel Interconnect
    • Myrinet
  
  
• Building a Beowulf
  • Building and Maintaining a Beowulf
    • Physical Infrastructure
      • Location, location, location
    • Power and Cooling for your Beowulf
      • Your Friend, Electricity
    • Building ``Workstation''-like Nodes
    • Building the Beowulf
      • Expensive but Simple
      • Cheap, Scalable, and Robust
      • Cheapest and Hardest: Diskless Nodes
    • Beowulf Maintenance
  • Tools and Tricks
  • The Food Chain: Recycling your Beowulf
  • Beowulfs Made to Order: Turnkey Vendors
    • Guidelines for Turnkey Vendor Submissions
  
  
• Beowulfs Everywhere
  • Beowulfs in Business
  • Beowulfs in Schools
  • Beowulfs in Government
  • Beowulfs in Developing Countries
  • Beowulfs at Home
    • Everything You Wanted to Know about Home Networking but were Afraid to Ask
    • The Rest of the Story
  • Justifying a Beowulf
    • Beowulf Description
  • Portable Beowulfs
    • Special Engineering Problems
    • Portable Example(s)
  
  
• Conclusion and Appendices
  • Conclusions: The Path to the Future
  • Beowulf Software: Libraries, Programs, Benchmarks
  • Beowulf Hardware: Computers, Networks, Switches
  • Beowulfery and Me: a Short Memoir
  • Bibliography
  
  
• Bibliography
• About this document ...

Open Publication License