Stone Soupercomputer

The Stone Soupercomputer was a Beowulf-style computer cluster built at the US Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the late 1990s. A group of lab employees including William W. Hargrove and Forrest M. Hoffman applied for a grant to build a cluster in 1996, but it was rejected. They decided to build a cluster anyway, using desktop personal computers that had been discarded as being too slow. The name was derived from the story of stone soup.[1] The developers used freely available and open source software such as Linux operating system, the Parallel Virtual Machine toolkit, and the Message Passing Interface library.[2]

By early 1997 the first applications were running on the cluster. By May 2001 it had 133 nodes. They included Intel 80486 and Pentium-based machines as well as a few DEC Alpha workstations. Low-cost Ethernet networking was used for interconnection instead of any special-purpose network.[2] The cluster was the subject of an article in Scientific American magazine in 2001.[1] Many applications were developed on this system that could then be deployed on other, faster clusters. The stone cluster was no longer in use by August 2003.[3] This approach was used as a model for other educational cluster projects.[4]

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Hargrove, William W.; Hoffman, Forrest M.; Sterling, Thomas (August 16, 2001). "The Do-It-Yourself Supercomputer". Scientific American 265 (2): pp. 72–79. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-do-it-yourself-superc.
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Hargrove, William W.; Hoffman, Forrest M. (1999). "Cluster Computing: Linux Taken to the Extreme". Linux Magazine. http://climate.ornl.gov/~forrest/linux-magazine-1999/.
3. ↑ Hoffman, Forrest M. (August 27, 2003). "The Stone SouperComputer - ORNL's First Beowulf-Style Parallel Computer". Project website. http://stonesoup.esd.ornl.gov/.
4. ↑ Adams, Joel; Vos, David (March 2002). "Small-college supercomputing: Building a Beowulf cluster at a comprehensive college". ACM Sigcse Bulletin 34 (1): 411–415. doi:10.1145/563517.563498. ISBN 1-58113-473-8.

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