Berkeley Network of Workstations (NOW)

• The Berkeley Network of Workstations (NOW) is an important representative of cluster systems. In 1997, the NOW project achieved over 10 Gflops on the Linpack benchmark, which made it one of the top 200 fastest supercomputers in the world.
• The hardware/software infrastructure for the project included 100 SUN Ultrasparcs and 40 SUN Sparcstations running Solaris, 35 Intel PCs running Windows NT or a PC Unix variant, and between 500 and 1000 disks, all connected by a Myrinet switched network.
• The programming environments used in NOW are sockets, MPI, and a parallel version of C, called Split C.
• Active Messages is the basic communication primitive in Berkeley NOW. The Active Messages communication is a simplified remote procedure call that can be implemented efficiently on a wide range of hardware.