Future planned or intended improvements

• Link the machines between themselves with Gigabit network, maintaining the Fast Ethernet connection with the machines in the department.
• Add some more nodes.
• Update to a kernel that uses all the 4G of RAM (currently only 1G is used).
• Install clustering software that will make the 4 machines look like one big virtual machine (support for process migration, task scheduling, load balancing).
• Use some cluster management tools (not needed so far since 4 machines is a manageable number).
• Install some commercial packages (CPLEX, Mathematica, MatLab).
• Parallelize the software we are using (the one we have sources for) using PVM or LAM to take advantage of all the 32 processors in one task if necessary.

The general idea is to use mostly free programs (which sometimes are of high quality and to come with sources) and to spend most of the money on hardware.