Small-college supercomputing: building a Beowulf cluster at a comprehensive college
SIGCSE '02 Proceedings of the 33rd SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Experience teaching hands-on parallel computing at a small college
Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges
Notes on constructing a parallel computing platform
Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges
Teaching parallel computing using Beowulf clusters: a laboratory approach
Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges
Teaching parallel computing to science faculty: best practices and common pitfalls
Proceedings of the eleventh ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming
Proceedings of the 2006 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
Cluster computing in the classroom and integration with computing curricula 2001
IEEE Transactions on Education
A short unit to introduce multi-threaded programming
Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges
Auction resource allocation mechanisms in grids of heterogeneous computers
WSEAS Transactions on Computers
Multicore education: pieces of the parallel puzzle
Proceedings of the 41st ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
A cluster for CS education in the manycore era
Proceedings of the 42nd ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
A stratified view of programming language parallelism for undergraduate CS education
Proceedings of the 43rd ACM technical symposium on Computer Science Education
Clustering Obsolete Computers to Reduce E-Waste
International Journal of Information Systems and Social Change
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A Beowulf cluster is a distributed memory multiprocessor built from commodity off-the-shelf PC hardware, an inexpensive network for inter-process communication, and open-source software. Today's multi-core CPUs make it possible to build a Beowulf cluster that is powerful, small, and inexpensive. This paper describes Microwulf, a Beowulf cluster that cost just $2470 to build, but provides 26.25 Gflops of measured performance. (For comparison: a 1996 Cray T3D MC256-8/464 provided 25.3 Gflops.) This makes Microwulf the first Beowulf with a price/performance ratio below $100/Gflop (for double-precision operations). The system measures just 11" x 12" x 17" (27.9 cm x 30.5 cm x 43.2 cm), runs at room temperature, and plugs into a standard wall outlet. These desirable characteristics combine to make Microwulf an attractive design for most computer science departments and/or individuals.