10 Years of Beowulf Clustering

Quirk writes "Wired News has a blurb celebrating the 10th birthday of the Beowulf cluster. Attendees recalled the initial fear and loathing the Beowulf project had to overcome. The Beowulf project takes its name from an epic poem penned circa 1000 A.D."

Beowulf - the name

[NotAJock]

Just because I'm an English (the language) geek, here's the lowdown on the name 'Beowulf':

The Beowulf poem is the oldest known epic in the Anglo-Saxon language (that's like, early english). It's about the life of a king of the "Geats" called Beowulf. It starts off as him as a young rash figher and follows through to his death after fighting a dragon.

Damn great story - there's probably loads of online texts (like this one? [everypoet.com]). The only surviving manuscript (possibly the only one ever written) is in the British Library. You can go there and see it.

Alternate Source for name "Beowulf"

[Nova Express]

I am given to understand that the name came not firsthand from the epic poem, but second-hand via Niven, Pournelle & Barnes' SF novel The Legacy of Hereot. In it were some big, nasty monsters they dubbed "grendels," which they then proceeded to wipe, only to find out that the adult form was what was keeping the numbers of the immature form under control, resulting in a massed attacked by thousands of "baby grendels." I remember reading that this was what inspired the Beowulf name in a FAQ several years ago. Anyone know if it's true?

Beowulf

[Mahtan]

Beowulf was a poem Tolkien really liked. A lotta the Rohirrim are based off of it.

Re:Sad

[NotAJock]

Becuase of your low UID, I'm guessing that you aren't asking what a Beowulf cluster is - so you're right on the mark with your comment. So for those Slashdotters who don't actually know what a Beowulf cluster is, here's my blurb (feel free to add/subtract/etc - this is paraphrased from a longer piece I wrote some time ago):

Beowulf aims at minimizing computation time. One option for reducing the processing time of a program is to divide it into independent sub-tasks that can be processed by different CPUs. When the results of these sub-tasks are available, they can be returned to one of the processors for final processing. It is possible to use Ethernet transfers to extend this strategy across multiple computers. This is how Beowulf works: divide programs into many parts that are executed by many CPUs all of which transfer their data and instructions via Ethernet.

The Year?

[swingerman]

"...name from an epic poem penned circa 1000 A.D."

That should be A.D. 1000. A.D. means "Anno Domini", Latin for "in the year of Our Lord", and should properly *precede* the year. B.C., on the other hand means "Before Christ" and properly *follows* the year.

contemporary epic poem

[Anonymous Coward]

El Cid

Check it out, yo.

http://www.legends.dm.net/paladins/cid.html
htt p://www.google.com/search?q=el+cid+campeador

Re:And 5 1/2 years of jokes

[the pickle]

More to the point, this comment [slashdot.org] seems to be the one, from February of 1999.

Where were *you* on 25 February 1999?

p