Commodity clusters

Bowers KJ, Chow E, Xu H et al (2006) Scalable algorithms for molecular dynamics simulations on commodity clusters. In International conference for high performance computing,... 

Commodity cluster A cluster consisting of computer nodes and network components that are readily available COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) systems and that contain no special-purpose components unique to the system or a given vendor product. 

Beowulf-class system A commodity cluster implemented using mass-market PCs and COTS network technology for low-cost parallel computing. 

A definition of commodity clusters developed by consensus is borrowed from the recent literature and reflects their important attribute that they comprise components... 

Constellations reflect a different balance of parallelism than conventional commodity clusters. Instead of the primary source of parallelism being derived from the number of nodes in the cluster, it is a product of the number of processors in each SMP node. To be precise, a constellation is a cluster in which there are more processors per SMP node than there are nodes in the cluster. While the nodes of a constellation must be COTS, its global interconnection network can be of a custom design. 

Of these, commodity clusters have emerged as the most prevalent and rapidly growing segment of cluster computing systems and are the primary focus of this article. 

Beowulf-class systems are commodity clusters employing personal computers (PCs) or small SMPs of PCs as their nodes and using COTS LANs or SANs to provide node interconnection. A Beowulf-class cluster is hosted by an open source Unix-like operating system such as Linux. A Windows-Beowulf system runs the mass-market widely distributed Microsoft Windows operating systems instead of Unix. 

The earliest use of commodity clusters involved little more software than the original node operating system and basic... 

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