ABSTRACT

It has been 12 years since Tom Sterling and Don Becker proposed the “Beowulf”-style commodity PC cluster in 1994 [12]. The performance of the first cluster ever built (called “Wigraf”) was a mere few tens of megaflops (MFLOPS), but enormous progress has been made, with the fastest systems reaching 10 teraflops (TFLOPS) or beyond. However, compared to specialized and dedicated supercomputers such as the Earth Simulator [3], it was unknown then whether scaling of 10s to 100s of thousands of processors with commodity PC clusters would be possible in order to attain 100s of TFLOPS and even petaflops (PFLOPS), not just in terms of peak performance but actual stability in operation as well as wide applicability.