The students in the Commodity Track of the SC13 Student Cluster Competition faced quite a challenge: build at least a dual-node HPC cluster, but spend no more than $2,500.
There are lots of ways to go, of course. You can get the smallest/cheapest motherboards possible and string a bunch of them together – like harnessing a bunch of gerbils to pull a wagon. Or you could opt for two much more powerful PC-like nodes, which would be like using two medium-sized dogs to drag the load.
In the chart, we see how the three university teams (plus one group of high schoolers) solved the problem. (You can also see their creative approaches on the video blogs that look at each team’s creations.) Continue reading