As others have said, Beowulf is a now relatively disused name for the concept of using commodity hardware to perform large computational tasks that historically have required large, "bigiron" servers.
As a concept, it's definitely alive today, and very active in the HPC industry, where I work. We use it quite extensively in our facility, since it's a very cost-effective way to get a large, general-purpose HPC computing facility. Having said that, it does sound like you're talking about something that's more of a network-load situation, not a computational-load situation. More of a network-balanced cluster, than a computational cluster. To be honest, I'm not certain how you'll handle that large of a number of simultaneous connections. You'll definitely need to distribute the connections among a pool of servers in some fashion. The trouble is, especially if you're using a hardware network load balancer like LVS, it's going to have a very hard time keeping up with that number of connections. Possibly some hardware solutions exist that can utilize special-purpose ASICs to balance that many connections, but you'll have to dig into that. I honestly don't know. Possibly one of Brocade's ServerIron devices or similar? Either way, it's not the type of load that one generally associates with HPC-type clusters that the "Beowulf" term usually implies. Lloyd Brown Systems Administrator Fulton Supercomputing Lab Brigham Young University http://marylou.byu.edu On 02/22/2014 02:42 AM, Dan Egli wrote: > Program X is intended to handle quite literally up to hundreds of millions > of simultaneous TCP connections across a number of network interfaces (the > exact number is unimportant). /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
