Chapter 2: Node Hardware
Chapter 2: Node Hardware
Highlights
Narayan Desai and Thomas Sterling
Few technologies in human civilization have experienced such a rate of growth as that of the digital computer and its culmination in the PC. Its low cost, ubiquity, and sometimes trivial application often obscure its complexity and precision as one of the most sophisticated products derived from science and engineering. In a single human lifetime over the fifty-year history of computer development, performance and memory capacity have grown by a factor of almost a million. Where once computers were reserved for the special environments of carefully structured machine rooms, now they are found in almost every office and home. A personal computer today outperforms the world's greatest supercomputers of two decades ago at less than one ten-thousandth the cost. It is the product of this extraordinary legacy that Beowulf harnesses to open new vistas in computation.
A Beowulf cluster is a network of nodes, with each node a low-cost personal computer. Its power and simplicity are derived from exploiting the capabilities of the mass-market systems that provide both the processing and the communication. This chapter explores the hardware elements related to computation and storage. The choice of node hardware, along with the choice of a system area network, will determine the basic performance properties of the Beowulf for its entire operational lifetime. Neither of these choices should be taken lightly; tremendous variation exists among instances of all components involved. This chapter discusses the components included in a cluster node, their function in a system, and their effects on node performance. Communication hardware is discussed in detail in Chapter 4.
The purpose of a Beowulf cluster is to perform parallel computations. This is accomplished by running applications across a number of nodes simultaneously. These applications may perform in parallel; that is, they may need to coordinate during execution. On the other hand, they may be performing an embarrassingly parallel task, or a large group of serial tasks. One key factor in application performance in all cases is local node performance.
