Commodity computing results from the Swiss-Tx project
Ralf Gruber, Pieter Volgers, Alessandro De Vita, Massimiliano Stengel · 2001
The aim of the Swiss-Tx project was to build, install, test and use high performance commodity computers. The biggest machine is the 70 Compaq Alpha processors Swiss-T1 machine installed at the EPFL computing centre and running in production mode since July 2000. This parallel MPI computer is well balanced in terms of processor speed, memory access, inter-processor communication network, and I/O capabilities. Due to the high flexibility of the cluster computing approach, it is today possible to fine tailor cost-effective MPI machines to the needs of reallife applications in engineering, database, WWW, data mining, or bioinformatics domains. Results obtained during the Swiss-Tx project are compiled in this paper.