Technologies

MPI is a widely-available communications library that enables parallel programs to be written in C, Fortran, Python, OCaml, and many other programming languages.

The GNU/Linux world supports various cluster software; for application clustering, there is Beowulf, distcc, and MPICH. Linux Virtual Server, Linux-HA - director-based clusters that allow incoming requests for services to be distributed across multiple cluster nodes. MOSIX, openMosix, Kerrighed, OpenSSI are full-blown clusters integrated into the kernel that provide for automatic process migration among homogeneous nodes. OpenSSI, openMosix and Kerrighed are single-system image implementations.

Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 based on the Windows Server platform provides pieces for High Performance Computing like the Job Scheduler, MSMPI library and management tools. NCSA's recently installed Lincoln is a cluster of 450 Dell PowerEdge 1855 blade servers running Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003. This cluster debuted at #130 on the Top500 list in June 2006.

gridMathematica provides distributed computations over clusters including data analysis, computer algebra and 3D visualization. It can make use of other technologies such as Altair PBS Professional, Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server, Platform LSF and Sun Grid Engine.

gLite is a set of middleware technologies created by the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) project.

Another example of consumer game products being added to high-performance computing is the Nvidia Tesla Personal Supercomputer workstation, which gets its processing power by harnessing the power of multiple graphics accelerator processor chips.

Algorithmic skeletons are a high-level parallel programming model for parallel and distributed computing which take advantage of common programming patterns to hide the complexity of parallel and distributed applications. Starting from a basic set of patterns (skeletons), more complex patterns can be built by combining the basic ones.

Global Storage Architecture (GSA)—a highly scalable cloud based NAS solution—combines proprietary IBM HPC technology (storage and server hardware and IBM's high-performance shared-disk clustered file system, GPFS) with open source components like Linux, Samba and CTDB to deliver distributed storage solutions. GSA exports the clustered file system through industry standard protocols like CIFS, NFS, FTP and HTTP. All of the GSA nodes in the grid export all files of all file systems simultaneously.

References

http://www.beowulf.org/overview/history.html