Editing Stone Soupercomputer

The '''Stone Soupercomputer''' was a [[Beowulf cluster|Beowulf-style computer cluster]] built at the US [[Oak Ridge National Laboratory]] in the late 1990s.

A group of lab employees including William W. Hargrove and Forrest M. Hoffman applied for a grant to build a [[Computer cluster|cluster]] in 1996, but it was rejected.  
They decided to build a cluster anyway, using desktop [[personal computer]]s that had been discarded as being too slow.  The name was derived from the story of [[stone soup]].<ref name="sciam">{{Cite news |title= The Do-It-Yourself Supercomputer |work= [[Scientific American]] |first1= William W. |last1= Hargrove| first2= Forrest M. |last2= Hoffman |first3= Thomas| last3=Sterling| author-link3=Thomas Sterling (computing) |volume= 265 |number= 2 |pages= 72–79 |date= August 16, 2001 |url= http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-do-it-yourself-superc |access-date= October 18, 2011 }}</ref>
The developers used freely available and [[open source software]] such as [[Linux]] operating system, the [[Parallel Virtual Machine]] toolkit, and the [[Message Passing Interface]] library.<ref name="extreme">{{Cite news |title= Cluster Computing: Linux Taken to the Extreme |first1= William W. |last1= Hargrove |first2= Forrest M. |last2= Hoffman |work= [[Linux Magazine]] |year= 1999 |url= http://climate.ornl.gov/~forrest/linux-magazine-1999/ |access-date= October 18, 2011 |url-status= dead |archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20111018122713/http://climate.ornl.gov/~forrest/linux-magazine-1999/ |archive-date= October 18, 2011 }}</ref>

By early 1997 the first applications were running on the cluster. By May 2001 it had 133 nodes. They included [[Intel 80486]] and [[Pentium]]-based machines as well as a few [[DEC Alpha]] workstations. Low-cost [[Ethernet]] networking was used for interconnection instead of any special-purpose network.<ref name="extreme"/> The cluster was the subject of an article in ''[[Scientific American]]'' magazine in 2001.<ref name="sciam"/> Many applications were developed on this system that could then be deployed on other, faster clusters.  The stone cluster was no longer in use by August 2003.<ref>{{Cite web |title= The Stone SouperComputer - ORNL's First Beowulf-Style Parallel Computer |work= Project website |date= August 27, 2003 |first= Forrest M. |last= Hoffman |url= http://stonesoup.esd.ornl.gov/ |url-status= dead |archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20031121211117/http://stonesoup.esd.ornl.gov/ |archive-date= November 21, 2003 |access-date= October 18, 2011 }}</ref>
This approach was used as a model for other educational cluster projects.<ref>{{cite journal |first1= Joel |last1=Adams |first2= David |last2= Vos |title=Small-college supercomputing: Building a Beowulf cluster at a comprehensive college |journal=ACM SIGCSE Bulletin |volume= 34 |number= 1 |date= March 2002 |pages=411–415 |doi= 10.1145/563517.563498 |isbn= 1-58113-473-8 |doi-access= free }}</ref>

== References ==
{{Reflist}}

[[Category:Parallel computing]]
[[Category:Oak Ridge National Laboratory]]