A Beowulf Cluster for Teaching and Learning

The use of commodity clusters in academic institutions as a cost effective solution for the study of Parallel & Distributed Computing is a well-accepted development since the success of the Beowulf Project at NASA. This paper aims explore the effects of parallel computing on some programs in a Linux based Beowulf Cluster. The research project analyses the performance of some selected parallel programs on the Cluster in an effort to provide a parallel computing system for the practical study of Parallel and Distributed computing. The process of assembling the cluster involves setting up a FastEthernet based LAN of five (5) system units and the installation of Ubuntu-server on them. Compilers were installed for program execution; MPICH for distributed processing; Secure-Shell (OpenSSH) for remote execution and Network File System (NFS) for file system sharing. For performance analysis, two sets of parallel programs were executed on the cluster with varying number of nodes and their respective performance documented. The first was a dense matrix-matrix multiplication program and the second was a program for finding the number of prime numbers in a given range. It was observed for both programs that the rate of increase of parallel speedup in these programs gets higher as the problem size increases (parallelism is more pronounced in larger problem sizes). It was also observed, in both programs, that for too small a problem size, parallelism comes with a penalty.