{"title":"Honey, I shrunk the Beowulf!","authors":"Wu-chun Feng, Michael S. Warren, E. Weigle","doi":"10.1109/ICPP.2002.1040868","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"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 14.7\" /spl times/ 4.7\" /spl times/ 0.58\". Each motherboard blade (node) contains a 633 MHz Trans-meta TM5600/spl trade/ 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 rack-mountable 3U space, i.e., 19\" in width and 5.25\" 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: total price-performance ratio, where total price encompasses TCO. We also propose two related (but more concrete) metrics: performance-space ratio and performance-power ratio.","PeriodicalId":393916,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings International Conference on Parallel Processing","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2002-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"19","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Proceedings International Conference on Parallel Processing","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPP.2002.1040868","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 19
Abstract
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 14.7" /spl times/ 4.7" /spl times/ 0.58". Each motherboard blade (node) contains a 633 MHz Trans-meta TM5600/spl trade/ 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 rack-mountable 3U space, i.e., 19" in width and 5.25" 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: total price-performance ratio, where total price encompasses TCO. We also propose two related (but more concrete) metrics: performance-space ratio and performance-power ratio.