Beowulf Computing Cluster - Space Technology Hall of Fame Recognition

In the late 1980s, the United States was concerned about falling behind in super-computing technology. James Fisher, then head of the Earth and Space Sciences (ESS) group at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, identified the contributing issues, assembled a team, and supplied the support, funding, and prototype systems to bring high-performance computing to fruition.

Thomas Sterling was then brought into the ESS group and came up with the original Beowulf concept, realizing that an open-source operating system might allow the group to cluster computers together, thereby achieving the best speeds at a substantially lower cost. NASA published the results, and the group followed by publishing a detailed account of how to build a Beowulf system. Companies adopted the technology and began to offer clustered systems, and by 1998, pre-configured Beowulf-type systems were available for purchase. Penguin Computing is a provider of Linux-based high-performance computer systems based on the Beowulf cluster and was one of the companies that made the cluster concept commercially viable. Beowulf-style clusters are still in use today around the globe.