Topic/Abstract:

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Donald Becker, Chief Scientist of Scyld Software and CTO of Penguin Computing, has consistently challenged conventional wisdom - from the early days of his Beowulf Project at NASA through to the creation of Scyld as a commercial entity and the introduction of the Scyld Beowulf distribution. By upsetting expected beliefs, Donald has maintained a continuum of innovation in the Linux arena that continues to address unmet needs today. Ten years ago, it was widely believed that only custom designed vector architectures could solve supercomputing problems.... Along came Beowulf which solved such problems using a connected cluster of commodity systems, based on Linux - at a time when many who had not explored Linux, either ignored it or grouped it with other 'toy' systems.  In fact at the first cluster systems conference in 1997 the widely held belief was that Microsoft held the future of all software in its hands. Fast forward to 2000 when Scyld introduced a prototype of a Unified Cluster System which completely changed the approach to building clusters by using a full installation only on a master node, with compute nodes running only applications. Donald's talk will look back on this history of challenging conventional wisdom and how it has contributed to the startling growth in Linux clustering; and he'll offer a glimpse of a future where, he believes, clustering will be the natural evolution of the computing ecosystem.


Bio Donald Becker
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Chief Scientist, Scyld Software and Chief Technology Officer, Penguin Computing.
Donald is an internationally recognized operating system developer and the original inventor of Beowulf. In 1999 he founded Scyld Computing and led the development of the next-generation Beowulf cluster operating system, which is the cornerstone for commodity-based high-performance cluster computing. Prior to founding Scyld, Don started the Beowulf Parallel Workstation project at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Don's work in parallel and distributed computing began in1983 at MIT's Real Time Systems group. He is known throughout the international community of operating system developers for his contributions to networking software and as the driving force behind beowulf.org.  He is the co-author of How to Build a Beowulf: A Guide to the Implementation and Application of PC Clusters. With colleagues from the California Institute of Technology and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, he was the recipient of the IEEE Computer Society 1997 Gordon Bell Prize for Price/Performance. Don holds a B.S. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.