[zrail]

Sure. They're not really called Beowulf clusters anymore, but even at the beginning there wasn't any particular defining characteristic other than a cluster of commodity servers running some kind of software that made them work together. You could consider the clusters at LHC, the render farms at Weta and Pixar, and (if you squint) the non-web clusters at Google and Facebook to all be spiritual descendants of the original Beowulf cluster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf_cluster

[GauntletWizard]

Huh. I always thought that Beowulf was an actual piece of software. But apparently it's only a capability set, and by its definition every Mesos and Kubernetes installation counts. Cool.

[bogomipz]

>"... the non-web clusters at Google and Facebook to all be spiritual descendants of the original Beowulf cluster."

I was intrigued by this comment. Could you elaborate on this? Are there specific concepts from Beowulf that FB's Tupperware and Google's Borg borrowed?

[zrail]

The entirety of the Beowulf concept is a cluster of commodity machines networked together that can work together to perform some kind of task. It's pretty general. The original Beowulf-style clusters ran things like mosix to present a single system image for applications but as far as I can tell that was never a defining characteristic.

[bogomipz]

Thanks, yes that's pretty broad, makes sense. Cheers.

[pjmlp]

Ah, still remember the early days of the LHC Computing Grid.....