Budget Parallelism
“Rolling your own” parallel computer with workstations on a network (Beowulf) is popular
This is simple and cost effective, and the machines can be used as workstations during the business hours
What are the impediments?
- Nonshared memory, nonshared address space
- Must be programmed w/ msg passing or ZPL
- As incubator for new applications, Beowulfs do not promote the use of shared memory
Everything in parallelism seems to come down to programming