The Beowulf Project 
                 CESDIS / NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Over the past two years the Beowulf Project at CESDIS has successfully produced
the Beowulf Parallel Workstation and has expanded in several directions.  The
Beowulf Project is primarily funded by the NASA's HPCC program through the
Earth and Space Sciences (ESS) project at Goddard Space Flight Center.  The
original objective was to provide a cost effective workstation class machine to
serve the needs of the ESS scientists.  While satisfying this primarily goal
the Beowulf project as expanded to include: application of Beowulf clusters to
other NASA requirements, enhancements to the Beowulf workstation, the Beowulf
consortium, and the Beowulf Secondary Storage System.  This poster session will
highlight the accomplishments of the project to date and will outline our plans
for the future.

Enhancements to the Beowulf workstation:

Work continues on the development of the workstation to provide a unified
system image.  By extending the traditional UNIX paradigms to be meaningful
in a distributed context, this work will give a user the appearance that the
cluster is running a single copy of the operating system.  This exploits the
fact that a Beowulf workstation is a tightly coupled, homogeneous, symmetric
cluster of PCs.  The current work is focusing on enhancements to Linux at
implement global (cluster-wide) PIDs, remote delivery of signals, global
synchronization and network virtual memory.

Application of Beowulf clusters to other NASA requirements:
  In addition to applications of the Earth and space scientist, eg.,
  computational cosmology and image registration, sibling organizations within
  NASA are looking to Beowulf clusters to solve their problems.  Regional Data
  Centers require low-level processing, turning raw satellite dumps into usable
  data products, and storage capability.  Colleagues at Clemson have started a
  three year project to determine the suitability of Beowulf technology to this
  task.  The Caltech has recently purchased a Beowulf cluster which will be
  used to interpret the result contained within the huge data set produced by
  large N-body simulation.  The Heterogeneous Architecture Testbed (HAT) will
  use a small Beowulf cluster as "workbench" on which test and integrate
  attached processors.

The Beowulf consortium: 
  CESDIS is a non-academic partner in the Beowulf Consortium including computer
  science and non-computer science departments at Drexel, Clemson, George
  Washington, UIUC, and George Mason.  The Consortium is a loosely coupled
  group that sees the potential of using Beowulf clusters as an affordable
  platform for courses in parallel programming and computational physics.


The Beowulf Secondary Storage System:
  The Beowulf Secondary Storage System is a project to construct a
  "to-scale" prototype mass storage system.  The goal is to construct a Network
  Attached Peripheral device that will provide a Terabtye of spinning storage
  and a Gigabyte/s aggregate bandwidth.  The project is jointly funded by NASA
  and DARPA and the system will be constructed at GSFC and integrated into the
  computing environment being constructed for the second phase of the ESS
  project.  The ESS environment provides the project with high volume, high
  speed requirements and capabilities, respectively, the Grand Challenge
  problems addressed by the program PI teams and the ESS "CAN" testbed (a large
  T3E) and more than 30 Terabytes of data stored on Goddard's mass storage
  system.