There was time when HPC or Supercomputing was only available to a select few. The barrier to get into the game was expensive. Then came a wrong idea: combine open software with commodity hardware.
Don’t do that! You can’t do that!
But some people did do that, and suddenly a wrong idea became a good idea and disrupted the entire HPC community and marketplace.
That pioneering approach to HPC is what the Beowulf Foundation intends to preserve and nurture. Beowulf cluster computing is now affordable and has become an integral, even standard, component in many areas of technical computing.
But we are not here to recycle the past. Indeed, we are here to help support a community that moves forward with open ideas and a penchant for trying new and possibly wrong things. Watch this space in the coming months as the Beowulf Foundation emerges and takes shape.
To understand our past, please watch our short documentary about the history of Beowulf computing:
I am grateful for your initiative and endeavor to launch the future Beowulf Foundation for the good of all machine-kind and their human collaborators. Watching this video was inspiring and moving to a degree I had forgotten.
— Thomas Sterling, Ph.D, Co-founder of the Beowulf Project
To understand our future, we have prepared a brief proposal describing how we plan to build an open community designed to support users and vendors alike:
The Beowulf Bash is the event that has no agenda, favors no particular vendor or organization, and is dedicated entirely to everyone's benefit in low-cost scalable computing for an ever expanding breadth of applications with no limitations except our imagination. Oh, and its commitment to fun in a shared context.
The Beowulf Bash is held annually at 9pm on the Monday night of SC and is free and open for all to attend. It’s a party FOR the HPC community, funded BY the HPC community. We thank the many vendors who have sponsored this unique event over the years, especially cornerstone vendors AMD and Penguin Computing. Check out the highly amusing Beowulf Bash invitations from the past decade and mark your calendar to join us next year!
© 2021 Beowulf Foundation