The Zippy Cluster

• Consists of 4 Dell PowerEdge 8530 machines, each with 8 Pentium III Xeon 550 MHz, 1M L2 Cache, 4G RAM, 18G hard drive.
• An 15 inch monitor and a keyboard is linked to all 4 of them through a multiplexer (mostly unused, only for emergencies).
• Connected to each other and to the department network through Fast Ethernet (100 MBS).
• Operating System: Red Hat Linux 6.1 (SMP version), Kernel 2.2.12.
• Current uptime is about 34 days. Rebooted only two times (once due to a miss configuration and the other time due to power shutdown in the whole building).
• Other important software installed: gcc (C, C++, Java, Fortran compiler), pvm (Parallel Virtual Machine), lam (free implementation of MPI). So far is running only free software.
• Fully remote administration (I saw the machines only 3 times, last one to take the picture).

The cluster was acquired on an Air Force Office of Scientific Research grant (under the DURIP program) to be used by Carla Gomes and Bart Selman for Platform for Principled Experimentation of Hard Computational Problems. Price: approximatively 150.000$.