Werewolf Cluster: Power Saving, High Performing Beowulf Cluster

Sandesh A Hiremath

^{Wipro Technologies
Wipro Technologies #72, Electronic City}

^{Hosur Main Road, Bangalore, India PIN-560100}

^{sandesh.ahiremath@wipro.com}

Abstract— This paper aims at presenting a simple approach for preserving the power consumption in a cluster environment by maximizing the resource usage of machines. It is achieved by deploying a low cost, power saving, high computing and scalable cluster called Werewolf Cluster. This is basically a Virtualized Beowulf Cluster involving a single machine or multiple machines spanning across LAN or WAN. Each cluster nodes are represented by a Virtual Machine (VM) deployed on a physical machine using Virtualization technologies like Xen & Vmware. The use of VM greatly reduces the number of physical nodes and also maximizes system resource consumption. Also load on the host machines can be distributed to minimize power wastage and to maximize throughput. Apart from that werewolf cluster is highly scalable with the capability of adding and removing slave nodes dynamically. Lastly, the paper provides only the environment for low cost, energy saving supercomputing. The efficiency of the utilization will depend on how well the program is parallelized.