Comment letters to the National Commission on Commission on Fraudulent Financial Reporting, 1987 (Treadway Commission) Vol. 1

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Abstract MBHÕ99: A Beowulf Cluster Capstone Project

The high costs of commercial parallel computing hardware and software place them beyond the reach of the Computer Science departments of many colleges and universities. By contrast, a Beowulf cluster is a dedicated system of commodity off-the-shelf PCs running free, open-source software and connected by inexpensive ethernet. A Beowulf cluster thus provides an inexpensive way to build a multiprocessor for parallel computing at a fraction of the cost of a commercial machine. This paper is an overview of our experience building MBHÕ99, an eight-node hypercube-topology Beowulf cluster of cast-off 486 machines, running Linux and the Message Passing Interface (MPI), and connected with 100Mbps ethernet. Building such a cluster requires the integration and application of concepts from operating systems, networking, parallel computing, and computer architecture, making it an excellent subject for a capstone project. We discuss the decisions we made during the design and implementation of MBHÕ99, and how we will do things differently next time. The total cost of MBHÕ99 was $6,100 in January 1999, all of which went for networking hardware. With recent price drops in 100 Mbps ethernet equipment, a similar system today can be built for roughly$3,000. 1