Zainco Beowulf

I have just bought 5 Sun Netra 1 T105 telco servers with the goal of building a commodity hardware Beowulf cluster. The hardware CAPEX for this R&D project is £1000.00 GBP.

The goals of the R&D project are:
1. To determine the applicability of parallelization to problems in Computational Finance
2. To evaluate various implementations of the Message Passing Interface
3. To explore the issues inherent in high frequency data visualisation
4. To harness the .NET parallelisation APIs
5. To have fun whilst I do all the above

One of these cuties looks like this-



I have £675.00 left to spend and this should buy the following hardware components:
1. 8-12U server cabinet,
2. 12 port networking switches,
3. Cabling CAT 5e 10/100

These T105's babies will be running the Open Solaris OS, SUN Grid Engine and the various MPI implementations currently available. I don't intend to spend a single penny on software apart from the bandwidth consumption costs incurred in downloading.