ESS housed Goddard’s arm of the high-performance computing initiative, as the Center required high-speed data analysis to work with the massive amounts of data generated by its Earth-imaging satellites. The existing systems also crashed regularly, forcing reboots that restarted all running jobs and could take half an hour.Īll this is documented in a 2014 paper by James Fischer, who managed the Earth and Space Science (ESS) Project at Goddard at the time. A single workstation might cost $50,000 per user.
#Beowulf colorset software
Parallel processing-using a cluster of processors to achieve a single task-was understood, but each vendor was developing its own proprietary software to run on costly proprietary hardware, and none was compatible with another. There was no clear path to achieve performance goals within the required cost range. But by 1993, the best codes were achieving just a few tens of gigaflops on the biggest machine, more than an order of magnitude slower and at many times the desired cost per operation. And it needed to work on systems cheap enough to be assigned to a single employee. Under one Federal program, the High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative, started in 1992, Goddard had set a goal of achieving teraflops-level supercomputing performance by 1997-a teraflops representing a speed of one trillion floating-point operations per second. Government, nervous about Japan’s high-performance computing effort, had already been pouring money into computer architecture research at NASA and other Federal agencies for more than a decade, and results were frustrating. In 1993, however, its odds may indeed have seemed long.
The technology, now known as the Beowulf cluster, would ultimately succeed beyond its inventors’ imaginations. Because it was completely outside the scope of the supercomputing community at that time.” “Not only did nobody care, but there were even a number of people hostile to this project,” says Thomas Sterling, who led the small team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in the early 1990s. In the Old English epic Beowulf, the warrior Unferth, jealous of the eponymous hero’s bravery, openly doubts Beowulf’s odds of slaying the monster Grendel that has tormented the Danes for 12 years, promising a “grim grappling” if he dares confront the dreaded march-stepper.Ī thousand years later, many in the supercomputing world were similarly skeptical of a team of NASA engineers trying achieve supercomputer-class processing on a cluster of standard desktop computers running a relatively untested open source operating system.
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