Berserkr: a Virtual Beowulf Cluster for Fast Prototyping and Teaching

Parallel programming is developing very fast and it is already part of several aspects of our everyday life. Furthermore, the fall of prices for hardware along with an increase in terms of reliability and performance, the wider and wider availability of free software and the wide usage and need for parallel computing and processing have created the natural environment for a development (an almost spontaneous evolution) that has lead to Beowulf, a technology to create a parallel supercomputer out of a cluster of Linux boxes. Nowadays it is possible to create parallel computers effectively at a reasonable price by using off-the-shelf technology. In fact it is possible to build a parallel computer at home by interconnecting components that can be found at an electronic shop. Moreover, we have to deal with the application rather than the specific hardware which carries it out. In fact, universal, general purpose parallel machines simply do not exist. The application must be designed before the cluster architecture. Berserkr represents the solution for this set of problems: it aims to be a tool to test and compare different possible implementations (both in hardware and in software) on several different architectures by building the hardware structure just in the virtual world and not physically.