Practical verification of an embedded Beowulf architecture using standard cluster benchmarks

The advent of embedded systems with greater capacity in terms of processing and general functionality has given rise to the recent use of embedded clusters, as seen in Singapore's Satellite Mission, X-Sat. This paper presents a Linux-based concurrent system of embedded network nodes, interconnected by Ethernet. It is formed of readily available components and is configured as a standard, commodity-based Beowulf class computer. It uses a free implementation of the Message Passing Interface. Combining the inherent benefits of Beowulf and embedded systems forms a space-efficient distributed system. Thus a multiple node system can be comfortably housed on a developer's desk, being programmed and administered in the same way as a conventional PC based cluster. To validate the system, standard benchmark results are shown for message passing protocol overhead and peak floating point rate of computation.