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“Distributed” or “grid” computing in general is a special type of parallel computing that relies on complete computers (with onboard CPUs, storage, power supplies, network interfaces, etc.) connected to a network (private, public or the Internet) by a conventional network interface producing commodity hardware, compared to the lower efficiency of designing and constructing a small ...
A basic approach to building a cluster is that of a Beowulf cluster which may be built with a few personal computers to produce a cost-effective alternative to traditional high-performance computing. An early project that showed the viability of the concept was the 133-node Stone Soupercomputer . [ 7 ]
One approach is grid computing, where the processing power of many computers in distributed, diverse administrative domains is opportunistically used whenever a computer is available. [1] An example is BOINC , a volunteer-based , opportunistic grid system, whereby the grid provides power only on a best effort basis.
Grid MP: Univa (formerly United Devices) Job Scheduler no active development Distributed master/worker HTC/HPC Proprietary: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris Cost Apache Mesos: Apache actively developed Apache license v2.0 Linux Free Yes Moab Cluster Suite: Adaptive Computing Job Scheduler actively developed HPC Proprietary
Server farms are commonly used for cluster computing. Many modern supercomputers comprise giant server farms of high-speed processors connected by either Ethernet or custom interconnects such as Infiniband or Myrinet. Web hosting is a common use of a server farm; such a system is sometimes collectively referred to as a web farm.
While early supercomputers used a few fast, closely packed processors that took advantage of local parallelism (e.g., pipelining and vector processing), in time the number of processors grew, and computing nodes could be placed further away, e.g., in a computer cluster, or could be geographically dispersed in grid computing.
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 first prototype was constructed in 2005 at Centre for Grid Computing, Cambridge-Cranfield High Performance Computing Facility. The first conference presentation was at IEEE Symposium on Cluster Computing and Grid (CCGrid), 9–12 May 2005, Cardiff, UK.