Beowulf Cluster Computing with Linux, 2/e

Description:

Use of Beowulf clusters (collections of off-the-shelf commodity computers programmed to act in concert, resulting in supercomputer performance at a fraction of the cost) has spread far and wide in the computational science community. Many application groups are assembling and operating their own "private supercomputers" rather than relying on centralized computing centers. Such clusters are used in climate modeling, computational biology, astrophysics, and materials science, as well as non-traditional areas such as financial modeling and entertainment. Much of this new popularity can be attributed to the growth of the open-source movement.

The second edition of Beowulf Cluster Computing with Linux has been completely updated; all three stand-alone sections have important new material. The introductory material in the first part now includes a new chapter giving an overview of the book and background on cluster-specific issues, including why and how to choose a cluster, as well as new chapters on cluster initialization systems (including ROCKS and OSCAR) and on network setup and tuning. The information on parallel programming in the second part now includes chapters on basic parallel programming and available libraries and programs for clusters. The third and largest part of the book, which describes software infrastructure and tools for managing cluster resources, has new material on cluster management and on the Scyld system.

William Gropp is Associate Division Director and Senior Computer Scientist, MCS Division, at Argonne National Laboratory.

Ewing Lusk is Senior Computer Scientist, MCS Division, both at Argonne National Laboratory.

Thomas Sterling is Senior Staff Scientist in the High Performance Computing Systems Group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

 

Table of Contents:

Series Foreword	xxiii
	Foreword	xxv
	Preface to the second edition	xxxi
	Preface to the first edition	xxxv
1	So You Want to Use a Cluster William Gropp	1
I	Enabling Technologies
2	Node Hardware Narayan Desai and Thomas Sterling	21
3	Linux Peter H. Beckman	41
4	System Area Networks Narayan Desai and Thomas Sterling	77
5	Configuring and Tuning Cluster Networks Daniel Nurmi and Brian Toonen	93
6	Setting Up Clusters Philip Papadopoulos	143
II	Parallel Programming
7	An Introduction to Writing Parallel Programs for Clusters Ewing Lusk, William Gropp and Ralph Butler	171
8	Parallel Programming with MPI William Gropp and Ewing Lusk	207
9	Advanced Topics in MPI Programming William Gropp and Ewing Lusk	245
10	Parallel Virtual Machine Al Geist	279
11	Fault-Tolerant and Adaptive Programs with PVM Al Geist and Jim Kohl	315
12	Numerical and Scientific Software for Clusters Victor Eijkhout and Jack Dongarra	335
III	Managing Clusters
13	Cluster Management J. P. Navarro	357
14	Cluster Workload Management James Patton Jones, David Lifka, Bill Nitzberg and Todd Tannenbaum	373
15	Condor: A Distributed Job Scheduler Todd Tannenbaum, Derek Wright, Karen Miller, Erik Paulson and Miron Livny	379
16	Maui Scheduler: A High Performance Cluster Scheduler David B. Jackson	427
17	PBS: Portable Batch System James Patton Jones	447
18	Scyld Beowulf Walt Ligon and Dan Stanzione	471
19	Parallel I/O and the Parallel Virtual File System Walt Ligon and Rob Ross	493
20	A Tale of Two Clusters: Chiba City and Jazz Rémy Evard	535
21	Conclusions William Gropp and Ewing Lusk	579
A	Glossary of Terms	583
B	Annotated Reading List	587
C	Annotated URLs	591
	References	595
	Index	607