Honey, I Shrunk the Beowulf!

In this paper, we present a novel twist on the Beowulf cluster — the Bladed Beowulf. Designed by RLX Technologies and integrated and configured at Los Alamos National Laboratory, our Bladed Beowulf consists of compute nodes made from commodity off-the-shelf parts mounted on motherboard blades measuring 14.7¼¼¢ 4.7¼¼¢ 0.58¼¼. Each motherboard blade (node) contains a 633-MHz Transmeta TM5600TM CPU, 256-MB memory, 10-GB hard disk, and three 100-Mb/s Fast Ethernet network interfaces. Using a chassis provided by RLX, twenty-four such nodes mount side-by-side in a vertical orientation to fit in a rackmountable 3U space, i.e., 19¼¼ in width and 5.25¼¼ in height. A Bladed Beowulf can reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of a traditional Beowulf by a factor of three while providing Beowulf-like performance. Accordingly, rather than use the traditional definition of price-performance ratio where price is the cost of acquisition, we introduce a new metric called ToPPeR: Tota...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: ICPP
• Authors: Wu-chun Feng, Michael S. Warren, Eric Weigle
• Keywords: Beowulf Cluster, Bladed Beowulf, ICPP 2002, Motherboard Blade