The Stone SouperComputer is no longer in operation,
but this
page stands as a tribute to its original design and
development.

Of particular historical interest is the Beowulf II
Pledge-A-Thon held early in 2001. Also fascinating to look at are the Stone SouperComputer
Node Specifications from a time when the cluster contained 128
nodes.

Forrest
Hoffman, 27 August 2003

The Stone SouperComputer

ORNL's First Beowulf-Style Parallel Computer

Forrest M.
Hoffman, William W. Hargrove,
and Andrew J.
Schultz

The Do-It-Yourself Supercomputer
from Scientific American (Vol.
265, No. 2, pp. 72-79)
by William W.
Hargrove, Forrest M.
Hoffman, and Thomas
Sterling
(August 2001)

Stone SouperComputer Photos
Available

Read about the Stone SouperComputer
In the News!

Introduction

While our first Beowulf-style parallel computer isn't built out of
the most impressive hardware, we got tired of fighting for funding and went
ahead with what we could find. Much like the classic Tale of Stone
Soup, many individuals contributed to the existing machine*. Because of a
complete lack of funding, we used surplus personal computers donated by
individuals from ORNL, the Procurement Dept.,
Y-12, and K-25, to build a parallel computer system which uses public domain
compilers and message passing libraries. This system was built at literally
no cost.

We are adding more nodes every week. Click here to donate your
personal computer equipment to the Stone SouperComputer. And be sure to tell
your friends.

People are often interested in the price-to-performance ratio of their
computer systems. Since our cost was approximately nothing, any performance
results in a zero price-to-performance ratio:

Performance-to-price is more interesting. If we get any performance at
all, the performance-to-price ratio goes quickly to infinity.

As soon as you login,
we all win!!

The system has already been used to develop software for large-scale landscape analysis
and more applications are pending. As interest in the project increases and as
applications are ported to the machine, we expect further contributions of
hardware or even funding (just like the Tale of Stone
Soup) that will result in a top-of-the-line, high performance parallel
computer dedicated to solving scientific problems.

* The name "Stone SouperComputer" was suggested to us by the honorable John Bell at
ORNL.

Hardware

The system is configured as one front-end system and the rest as
compute nodes. The compute nodes share a private ethernet; the front-end
system is connected to the private ethernet and to the Internet. Each of
the PCs in the system has:

Mostly Intel 486DX-2/66 CPUs and an increasing number of Pentiums,
with every kind of motherboard imaginable (can you say
heterogeneous?). And now we have Compaq/DEC Alpha CPUs as well.

16-32 MB memory (most have 32 MB)

400-600 MB disk

10 Mb/s ethernet adapter

Software

RedHat Linux is the operating
system for Intel processors. Digital Unix is the operating system for
Alpha processors.

MPICH,
PVM, and LAM/MPI for message passing

GNU C, C++ and FORTRAN (g77) compilers, and Pro Fortran for Linux
from Absoft Corporation.

Nodes in Cluster
Today

Pentium Nodes
Today

Alpha Nodes
Today

Publications

The Stone
SouperComputer - In the News!

Hargrove, William W., Forrest M. Hoffman, and Thomas Sterling.
August 2001. "The
Do-It-Yourself Supercomputer." Scientific
American, Vol. 265, No. 2, pp. 72-79.

Hoffman, Forrest M. and William W. Hargrove. Winter 2000. "High
Performance Computing: An Introduction to Parallel Programming With
Beowulf." Open Source
Developers Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 24-31.

Hargrove, W. W. and F. M. Hoffman. September 2-8, 2000. An
Analytical Assessment Tool for Predicting Changes in a Species
Distribution Map Following Changes in Environmental Conditions.
Proceedings
of the Fourth International Conference on Integrating GIS and
Environmental Modeling (GIS/EM4): Problems, Prospects and Research
Needs, Banff, Alberta, Canada.

Gwo, J. P., F. M. Hoffman, and W. W. Hargrove. April 2000. Mechanistic-Based
Genetic Algorithm Search on a Beowulf Cluster of Linux PCs.
Proceedings of the High Performance Computing 2000 (HPC2000)
Conference, Washington, DC.

Mahinthakumar, G., F. M. Hoffman, W. W. Hargrove, and N. T. Karonis.
November 13-15, 1999. Multivariate
Geographic Clustering in a Metacomputing Environment Using
Globus. Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE SC99 Conference, Portland, OR.

Hoffman, F. M. and W. W. Hargrove. Fall 1999. "Parallel
Computing With Linux." Crossroads,
Volume 6, Number 1.

Hargrove, W. W. and F. M. Hoffman. July 26-30, 1999. "An Analytical Assessment
Tool for Predicting Changes in a Species Distribution Map Following
Changes in Environmental Conditions." In Proceedings of the
1999 ESRI International User Conference CD-ROM (and World Wide Web
site here).

Hargrove, W. W. and F. M. Hoffman. July/August 1999. "Using
Multivariate Clustering to Characterize Ecoregion Borders." Computing in Science &
Engineering, Vol. 1, No. 4, pp. 18-25.

Hoffman, F. M. and W. W. Hargrove. June 28-July 1, 1999. "Multivariate
Geographic Clustering Using a Beowulf-style Parallel Computer."
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Parallel and
Distributed Processsing Techniques and Applications (PDPTA '99),
Volume III, H. R. Arabnia, Ed. ISBN 1-892512-11-4, CSREA Press, pp.
1292-1298.

Hoffman, Forrest M. and William W. Hargrove. Spring 1999. "Cluster
Computing: Linux Taken to the Extreme." Linux Magazine, Volume 1,
Number 1.

Hoffman, Forrest M. and William W. Hargrove. May 1998. "Making
Soup from Stones." Troubleshooting
Professional, Volume 2, Issue 5.

Applications

Global
Terrestrial Ecosystem Carbon Model

An Analytical
Assessment Tool for Predicting Changes in a Species Distribution Map
Following Changes in Environmental Conditions

A New
High-Resolution National Map of Vegetation Ecoregions Produced
Empirically Using Multivariate Spatial Clustering

National Temperature Interpolation
The second
environmental application completed on the Stone SouperComputer was the
interpolation of 39 national maps of mean, minimum, and maximum (monthly
and annual) temperature from over 4000 meteorological stations. There
are 7.7 million 1-km cells in each of the resulting maps. These datasets
represent the highest resolution national temperature maps currently
available anywhere. Click here to
see an animation of the national monthly mean temperature maps.

Clustering for
Landscape Analysis

Beowulf WWW
Sites

The Beowulf Project (formerly
at NASA Goddard; now hosted by Scyld Computing Corp.)

The Beowulf
FAQ (Read it before asking!!!)

Extreme Linux

Beowulf Underground

Links to Other Beowulf
Computers

The original
Beowulf (NASA Goddard)

Avalon (Los Alamos
National Laboratory) - ranked 113th on Top500 Supercomputers list (17
November 1998)

Brahma (Duke
University)

CACR's
Beowulf Machine (California Institute of Technology)

Loki - Commodity Parallel
Processing (Los Alamos National Laboratory)

Drexel
Beowulf Supercomputer (Drexel University)

Grendel
(Clemson University)

Megalon (Sandia National
Laboratories)

Aeneas (University of
California at Irvine)

. . . and then there is the original Beowulf manuscript and Beowulf
text.

Beowulf (or Beowulf-Infiltrated) Events and
Conferences

2nd Cluster Computing in the
Sciences Conference (8-9 February 2001)

North
Carolina Geographic Information Systems Conference (1-2 March 2001)

The
4th Annual Linux Showcase & Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
(10-14 October 2000)

The 3rd Annual Atlanta Linux
Showcase (12-16 October 1999)

The Fifth
Joint DOE/NASA PC Clustered Computing Conference (6-9 October 1999)

The 1999 International
Conference on Parallel and Distributed Processing Techniques and
Applications (PDPTA'99) (28 June - 1 July 1999, Monte Carlo Resort,
Las Vegas, Nevada, USA)

Cluster
Computing Technologies, Environments, and Applications (CC-TEA)

Extreme
Linux Workshop #2, in conjunction with the USENIX Annual Technical
Conference (8-11 June 1999, Monterey, California, USA)

5th Annual Linux Expo (18-22
May 1999, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA)

LinuxWorld Conference &
Expo (2-4 March 1999, San Jose, California, USA)

Supercomputing '98, High
Performance Networking and Computing Conference (7-13 November 1998,
Orlando, Florida, USA)

Extreme Linux
Guide to Supercomputing '98 (7-13 November 1998, Orlando, Florida,
USA)

Seventh IEEE International
Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (28-31 July
1998, Chicago, Illinois, USA)

Linux
Expo '98 (28-30 May 1998, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina,
USA)

Extreme
Linux Workshop #1 (12-13 February 1998, Sante Fe, New Mexico, USA)

Scalable Cluster
Workshop (21-22 November 1997, Moneterey, California, USA)

Pentium Pro Cluster
Workshop (10-11 April 1997, Des Moines, Iowa, USA)

Cluster Computing
Conference - CCC '97 (9-11 March 1997, Emory University, Atlanta,
Georgia, USA)

Programming
Resources

RPMs for ScaLAPACK,
LAPACK, PBLAS, BLAS, PARPACK, and Atlas at Scyld Computing

Numerical
Recipes Books On-Line

Linux
Resources

Freshmeat

Linux Care

Linux Daily News

Linux Focus

Linux Gazette

LinuxHQ

Linux International

Linux Journal

Linux Magazine

Linux Mall

Linux Net
News

Linux Online!

Linux Power

Linux Today

Linux Weekly News

Linux World - Putting
Linux to Work

Open Source Developers
Journal

Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff
that Matters

Troubleshooting
Professional, Vol. 2, Issue 10, November 1998 (The
Linux Issue!)

Other Stone
Soups

Another version of The
Stone Soup Story

The FRACTINT version of The Stone
Soup Story

Stone Soup (a real soup
kitchen)

Stone Soup (a magazine by
young writers and artists)

Stone Soup
(a neighborhood enhancement project)

Stone Soup Child Care
Programs

Stone Soup Coffee
House (a Rhode Island folk music venue)

Stone Soup for the World (a
service-oriented WWW site)

Stone Soup Software Development
Company (a Canadian educational software firm)

Stone Soup
(a musical group)

Stone Soup Inn (a bed
& breakfast in Indianapolis)

Stone Soup
Theatre (a community arts theatre in Norman, Oklahoma)

Stone
Soup (a comic strip)

Stone Soup
Forum (a lunchtime program of a community food co-op in
Urbana-Champaign, Illinois)

Forrest M. Hoffman, William W. Hargrove, and Andrew J. Schultz
Created:
Wednesday, August 27, 1997
This page is available at http://www.extremelinux.info/stonesoup/
Warnings and
Disclaimers