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M. S. Warren (LANL)
It is now possible to construct high-performance ``Beowulf'' computers entirely out of commodity components and freely available software, thus obtaining a significant price/performance advantage over typical parallel machines. Avalon is such a parallel supercomputer. It contains 140 Alpha microprocessors connected by a fast ethernet switch, as well as 35 Gigabytes of memory and 500 Gbytes of disk storage. The total cost of the machine was slightly over $300k.
Avalon has performed gravitational treecode simulations of galaxy formation at rates of nearly 20 Gigaflops using over 100 million particles. The machine's performance of 48.5 Gigaflops on the well-known Linpack benchmark ranks it near the 100th fastest computer in the world. The resulting price/performance demonstrates that for some applications Avalon can provide computing power equivalent to commercial machines which cost nearly ten times as much. Beyond the cost advantage there are also additional benefits such as flexibility, upgradability, and the ability to have control of your own supercomputing resources.
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