An Analysis of the Cost Effectiveness of an Adaptable Computing Cluster

With a focus on commodity PC systems, Beowulf clusters traditionally lack the cutting edge network architectures, memory subsystems, and processor technologies found in their more expensive supercomputer counterparts. What Beowulf clusters lack in technology, they more than make up for with their significant cost advantage over traditional supercomputers. This paper presents the cost implications of an architectural extension that adds reconfigurable computing to the network interface of Beowulf clusters. This extension is called an intelligent network interface card (INIC). A quantitative description of cost-effectiveness is formulated to compare alternatives.Cost-effectiveness is considered in the context of three applications: the 2D Fast Fourier Transform (2D-FFT), integer sorting, and PNN image classification. It is shown that, for these three representative applications, there is a range of basic hardware costs and cluster sizes for which the INIC is more efficient than a purely serial solution or an ordinary cluster. Furthermore, the cost model has proven useful for designing the next generation INIC.