•use clusters of
PCs (Beowulf)
–network of personal computers
–usually running Linux operating system
–powerful CPUs (Pentium3/4, Athlon)
–high speed networking (100 MBps, 1 GBps, Myrinet)
–much cheaper than supercomputers
–still quite expensive (install, upgrade, maintenance)
–trade higher availability and/or greater performance for lower cost