An Evaluation of Some Beowulf Clusters

We report the results of an evaluation project on three Beowulf type clusters. The purpose of this study was to assess both the performance of the clusters and the availability and quality of the software for cluster management and management of the available resources. This last goal could hardly be achieved because at the time this project was undertaken much of the management software was either very immature or not yet available. However, it was possible to assess the cluster performance both from the point of view of single program execution as well as with respect to throughput by loading the systems according to a predefined schedule via the available batch systems. To this end a set of application programs, ranging from astronomy to quantum chemistry, together with a synthetic benchmark were employed. From the results we wanted to derive answers about the viability of using cluster systems routinely in a multi-user environment with comparable maintenance cost and effort to that of an integrated parallel machine.