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Spinoff story
Beowulf Clusters Make Supercomputing Accessible
A real-world story of NASA technology finding a life beyond the mission.
About this technology
Overview
In the 1990s, efforts to develop supercomputers were stalling well short of Government goals until a pair of computer engineers at Goddard Space Flight Center successfully used a new, open source operating system to turn a cluster of standard computers into a single supercomputer. Known as the Beowulf cluster, the technology dramatically reduced the cost of supercomputing, and most of the world’s top supercomputers today are based on it. Minneapolis-based Nor-Tech custom-builds Beowulf clusters for customers that use them primarily to design products through modeling and simulation.