Editing Beowulf cluster (section)

{{Short description|Type of computing cluster}}
{{More citations needed|date=November 2020}}
[[File:Beowulf-cluster-the-borg.jpg|thumb|The Borg, a 52-node Beowulf cluster used by the [[McGill University]] [[pulsar]] group to search for pulsations from binary pulsars]]
{{External media|image1=[https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/supercomputers/10/71/909 The original Beowulf cluster built in 1994] by [[Thomas Sterling (computing)|Thomas Sterling]] and [[Donald Becker]] at [[NASA]]. The cluster comprises 16 [[white box (computer hardware)|white box]] desktops each running a [[i486]] DX4 processor clocked at 100&nbsp;MHz, each containing a 500&nbsp;MB hard disk drive, and each having 16&nbsp;MB of [[Random-access memory|RAM]], leading to a total of roughly 8&nbsp;GB of fixed disk storage and 256&nbsp;MB of RAM shared within the cluster and a performance benchmark of 500 M[[Floating point operations per second|FLOPS]].}}
A '''Beowulf cluster''' is a [[computer cluster]] of normally identical, commodity-grade computers networked into a small [[local area network]] with libraries and programs installed that allow processing to be shared among them. The result is a high-performance [[parallel computing]] cluster from inexpensive [[personal computer]] hardware.