James (Jim) Fischer, a 50-year resident of Greenbelt, was recently lauded during the induction of Beowulf Computing into the Space Foundation’s Hall of Fame. Fischer, who worked at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center from 1974 to 2014, is the co-creator of the Beowulf computing cluster concept originally developed at Goddard as part of research into massively parallel computing technology.
As the group lead for the project, Fischer collaborated with his colleague Thomas Sterling to capitalize on the increasing availability of inexpensive but powerful computing components. These commercial components, each as powerful as early supercomputers, could be interlinked in the Beowulf architecture on the massive scale needed for the vast, repetitive and inter-related computations necessary for the large-scale numerical modeling necessary to understand interactions and measure the changes taking place within Earth’s land, ocean and atmosphere.
In his speech to the foundation, Fischer referred to the ever-increasing firehose of data the Beowulf Cluster was developed to analyze and use in models as more and more space-based observations were made. He was instrumental in the launch of the Beowulf architecture into commercial and industrial applications where, despite the evolution of ever more-powerful components, the original ground-breaking design still remains core to the technology.
As a result, this technology underpins the world’s supercomputer capability, with almost all the 500 most powerful such installations using off-the-shelf hardware linked in the basic Beowulf architecture, with operating systems that are variants of the original Linux. Unlike clusters of independent machines, Beowulf clusters operate collectively rather than as individual machines, sharing resources and operating as a single, massively parallel, virtual supercomputer.
The Space Foundation is a nonprofit advocate organization founded in 1983 to support education, information and collaboration for space exploration and space-inspired industries. Its Hall of Fame inducts technologies rather than people. A list of prior inductees can be found at spacefoundation.org/inducted-technologies.
Beowulf is an Anglo-Saxon hero, much engaged with the vanquishing of dragons and other monsters.