The Stone Soupercomputer was a 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 cluster in 1996, but it was rejected. They decided to build a cluster anyway, using desktop personal computers that had been discarded as being too slow. The name was derived from the story of stone soup. [1] 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. [2]
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. [2] The cluster was the subject of an article in Scientific American magazine in 2001. [1] 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. [3] This approach was used as a model for other educational cluster projects. [4]