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University of Wyoming

UW Heorot Beowulf Cluster

Beowulf, written in Old English sometime before the tenth century A.D., describes the adventures of a great Scandinavian warrior of the sixth century. It is also a code name for a worldwide community of computer systems utilizing off-the-shelf technology to deliver high-performance processing power at the lowest possible cost. Heorot, a Beowulf-class cluster computer, was recently installed at UW with funding from the Northern Rockies Regional Biomedical Research Infrastructure Network (BRIN). Heorot (or Herot) is described in Beowulf as “a mead-hall, the greatest the world had ever seen, or even imagined.” It was built by Hrothgar, King of the Danes, and is the scene of Beowulf’s epic battle with the monster Grendel.

The world-wide “Beowulf project” was initiated in 1994 by two researchers at Goddard Space Flight Center who built a cluster computer out of 16 processors connected by Ethernet. This computer, which they called Beowulf, provided a parallel computing environment for solving problems with huge computing and storage requirements in a fraction of the time required to run on even the most powerful desktop computers, but at a fraction of the cost of a large parallel computer. Learn more at Beowulf.org.

Beowulf-class computers are used in a variety of application environments where high-performance computing is needed; the goal in creating Heorot is to provide such computing capacity at UW in support of the bioinformatics core of BRIN.