My first experiences with clusters were at Abo Akademi in Finland, where we built two clusters.
The first cluster consists of 44 standard Pentium III PC "boxes" (866MHz, 768 MB RAM). Each node has a 20 GB hard disk drive. The system was assembled in April 2001. It was financed by a grant from the Vaisala Foundation (administered by the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters).
The second cluster has 24 Intel Celeron nodes (Tualatin, 1.2 GHz, 1.5 GB RAM). It is a low-cost system, where the motherboards are mounted in a home-made compact rack and three nodes share one power supply. Only the master node has hard/floppy disk drives. This system was assembled in November 2002. It was financed in part by a grant from the Research Institute at Abo Akademi.
A detailed description of the Celeron cluster and how it was built are presented here. This design was used as a basis for the 48-node cluster built at BU.
Pentium III system
(44 nodes)
Celeron system
(24 nodes)
