The Mikrus Cluster

      The Mikrus^# cluster at the Institute of Theoretical Physics, University of Bialystok is a small-size Beowulf-type cluster, dedicated to analysis of gravitational wave data. Currently it has 6 computing nodes and a front-end machine, acting as a server.
      Computing nodes all come with Intel Pentium 4 processors, running at speeds from 2.5 to 3.4 GHz. Each node has 1000 Mb/s Ethernet card, 1 GB RAM and some amount (20–120 GB) of local disk space for scratch data. Nodes are interconnected with 1000Base-T (gigabit ethernet) network. The cluster has a total of 1 TB storage capacity.
      The front-end machine and computing nodes both are running Gentoo Linux with 2.6.x kernel. Cluster utilizes free, open-source software for high performance parallel computing. OpenLDAP is used for naming services, NFS for shared home directories, and NTP for time synchronization. LAM/MPI libraries are available for parallel programming.

Mikrus cluster located in Institute of Theoretical Physics of Bialystok University (Bialystok is a city in North-East Poland). From left to right: Piotr Jaranowski, Maciej Pietka, Andrzej Pisarski i Andrzej Królak Computer screen showing output of the top command a few minutes after the start of the search