Cluster computing on a small department budget
David Bainum, Bruce Mechtly · Journal of computing sciences in colleges · 2010
This paper discusses our experience in an advanced computer science course in which students built modern computing clusters from scratch. The least expensive cluster used an existing computer lab for the compute nodes. The students also built a 10-node cluster using bare-bones computer kits for a total cost of about $2800. For software we used Perceus which is included in the CAOS NSA Linux distribution. Students were required to perform a number of administrative tasks on the system, write and test simple parallel programs (using OpenMPI), and run benchmark programs to compare performance with other parallel systems.