Beowulf Software

Index

• Beowulf System Software
  • Packaged as RPMS
  • Packaged as patches
• Programming models
  • Distributed Computing Environments
  • Network Virtual Memory
• Beowulf and Technology
• Beowulf software from other sites
• Other Linux Software

Overview

The Beowulf software environment is implemented as an add-on to commercially available, royalty-free base Linux distributions. These distributions include all of the software needed for a networked workstation: the kernel, Linux utilities, the GNU software suite, and many add-on packages. Initially we used the very popular Slackware distribution. We have now migrated to the RedHat distribution with its better package management and upgrade system.

The Beowulf distribution includes several programming environments (all developed elsewhere) and development libraries as individually installable packages. PVM, MPI, and BSP are all available. SYS-V--style IPC and p-threads are also supported. A considerable amount of work has gone into improving the network subsystem of the kernel and implementing fast network device support. Most of these changes have been incorporated into the kernel source code tree, although many device driver updates are still in the active development or tuning phase.

In the Beowulf scheme, as is common in NOW clusters, every node is responsible for running its own copy of the kernel and nodes are generally sovereign and autonomous at the kernel level. However, in the interests of presenting a more uniform system image to both users and applications, we have extended the Linux kernel to allow a loose ensemble of nodes to participate in a number of global namespaces. A guiding principle of these extensions is to have little increase in the kernel size or complexity and, most importantly, negligible impact on the individual processor performance.

Beowulf System Software

BPROC: Beowulf Distributed Process Space

This packages allows a process ID space to span multiple nodes in a cluster environment and also provides mechanisms for starting processes on other nodes. (This package is for Linux 2.2.x kernels.)

Network Device Drivers

We have long contributed to the development of the Linux networking code. Many of the Linux ethernet device drivers, and most of the device drivers for cost-effective high-performance network adapters were written by Donald Becker at CESDIS. A large portion of his time goes into maintaining and enhancing the performance of these device drivers. Fast Ethernet has long been a cluster staple, while Gigabit Ethernet has recently been tested.

Beowulf Ethernet Channel Bonding

One of the goals of the goals of the Beowulf project is to demonstrate scalable I/O using commodity subsystems. For scaling network I/O we devised a method to join multiple low-cost networks into a single logical network with higher bandwidth.

PVM-TCL

A set of extensions to TCL that allow you to manipulate the PVM virtual machine directly. NOTE: This currently does not extend the message-passing calls to TCL, just the PVM configuration ones. One could, however, implement them from the base provided here.

Virtual Memory Pre-Pager

A loadable kernel module for Linux 2.0 that implements a non-blocking page read-in system call. With the proper run-time support, this new system call can dramatically reduce the run-time of "out-of-core" programs (programs that have data sets larger than the available physical memory) by allowing multiple pages to be read from disk prior to their actual use.

PPro Performance Counter Patches

Kernel patches (for 2.0.36, 2.2.2 and 2.2.9) and a small library to add kernel support for the performance counters found in the Pentium Pro and Pentium II.

LM78 Hardware Monitor Driver

A loadable kernel module for Linux 2.0 and 2.1 that provides a /proc interface for the LM78 Hardware Monitor. (Note: This driver speaks to the hardware monitors via the ISA interface. This driver does not support boards that only have the serial interface on the hardware monitor connected.)

Intel PR440FX Netbooting Tools

Tools to assist with nebooting from built in network interface on the Intel PR440FX and possibly other AMI Bios motherboards.