How to Build An AppleSeed: A Parallel Macintosh Cluster for Numerically Intensive

We have constructed a parallel cluster consisting of 25 Apple Macintosh G3 and G4 computers running the MacOS, and have achieved very good performance on numerically intensive, parallel plasma particle-in-cell simulations. A subset of the MPI message-passing library was implemented in Fortran77 and C. This library enabled us to port code, without modification, from other parallel processors to the Macintosh cluster. For large problems where message packets are large and relatively few in number, performance of 50-150 MFlops/node is possible, depending on the problem. Unlike Unix-based clusters, no special expertise in operating systems is required to build and run the cluster