Commodity Clusters: Performance Comparison Between PC's and Workstations

1 Introduction Traditionally, the bulk of large scale scientific and engineering computations were performed on large specialized Supercomputers. In the last seven years, RISC based workstation technology has largely supplanted the Supercomputing market. Using techniques such as workstation clustering, wide classes of problems have been successfully attacked. Workstation clusters are networked RISC UNIX systems commonly provided by vendors such as Digital Equipment Corporation. Each of these vendors is the predominant or proprietary supplier of both hardware and UNIX operating systems. Applications run on proprietary workstation clusters use UNIX features that enable hi& performance floating point, fast disk drive transfer rates, and robust networking performance in a multiuser , multi-system environment. uNu(workstation clusters are capable of achieving supercomputer efficiencies on many computationally intensive tasks. Additionally, individual cluster systew can be used as desktop UNLX workstations.