Motivated by the computational demands of our research and budgetary constraints which are common to many research institutions, we built a " poor man's supercomputer " , a cluster of PC nodes which together can perform parallel calculations at a fraction of the price of a commercial supercomputer. We describe the construction, cost, and performance of our cluster.

1941 1 (Floating Point operations / second, Flop/s) 1945 10

High Performance Computing is now one of the emerging fields in computer science and its applications. Top HPC facilities, supercomputers, offer great opportunities modeling diverse processes thus allowing to create more greater products without full-scale experiments. Current supercomputers applications for them are very complex hard use efficiently. monitoring systems tools that help understa...

The availability of high-speed networks and increasingly powerful commodity microprocessors is making the usage of clusters, or networks, of computers an appealing vehicle for cost effective parallel computing. Clusters, built using Commodity-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware components as well as free, or commonly used, software, are playing a major role in redefining the concept of supercomputing...