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From the self reference department

The Beowulf Foundation was announced by Douglas Eadline and Lara Kisielewska at the SC 2021 Beowulf Bash in St Louis. The idea for a “Foundation” emerged from the continued discussion amongst the Beowulf community about the supporting the “Beowulf Ethos,” that began with the Beowulf Project at NASA using commodity hardware and open source software to build high-performance systems at low cost. Initially considered an anomaly, the “wrong ideas” demonstrated by the Beowulf Project changed the face of modern supercomputing.

The goal of the Beowulf Foundation is not to relive the past, but to support the “wrong” ideas of the future that may lead to further breakthroughs in high performance computing. As stated by Eadline:

“The Foundation is not forming to relive the past, but rather support a community of new and existing HPC computing ideas. For example, areas like Raspberry Pi clusters, RISC-V, software containers, new languages, and even 3D-printing represent new directions that may lead to the next leap in accessibly, performance, and education in the HPC community.”

Eadline continues, “Indeed, that next disruptive idea may already be out there looking for additional community support. That is where the Beowulf Foundation comes into play. We believe both HPC vendors and the open community will benefit from strengthening old ideas and supporting new ones that might just be wrong enough to be successful.”

The announcement is located Foundation page and highlights a documentary video about the origin of the Beowulf Project and a proposal outlining how the Beowulf Foundation plans to move forward and become a community centric organization supporting vendors, users, and innovators.

In case you didn't know about the Beowulf Bash.
The Beowulf Bash is held annually at 9pm on the Monday night of SC and is free and open for all to attend. It’s a party FOR the HPC community, funded BY the HPC community. We thank the many vendors who have sponsored this unique event over the years, especially cornerstone vendors AMD and Penguin Computing. Check out the highly amusing Beowulf Bash invitations from the past decade and mark your calendar to join us next year!