Network of Workstations

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A Network of Workstations (NOW) is a computer network that connects several computer workstations together with special software forming a cluster. A Cluster of Workstations (COW) is sometimes used as an alternate term.

In 1996 researchers at Berkeley snared the Minute Sort Record, making NOW the fastest sorting system at the time.

In 1997 researchers at Berkeley achieved 10 gigaflops on the LINPACK benchmark, making NOW, its new distributed supercomputer, also one of the 200 fastest number crunchers in the world at that time.

NOW also formed the hardware and software foundation used by the Inktomi search engine, which led to a multi-tier architecture for Internet services based on distributed systems that is used today.

[edit] See also

• Distributed computing

[edit] External links

• Berkeley NOW Project