317 CLUSTERS AT LIGHTSPEED CONFIGURING LARGE HIGH- PERFORMANCE CLUSTERS AT LIGHTSPEED

Over a decade ago, the TOP500 list was started as a way to measure supercomputers by their sustained perform-ance on a particular linear algebra benchmark. Once reserved for the exotic machines and extremely well-funded centers and laboratories, commodity clusters now make it possible for smaller groups to deploy and use high per-formance machines in their own laboratories. This paper describes a weekend activity where two existing 128-node commodity clusters were fused into a single 256-node cluster for the specific purpose of running the benchmark used to rank the machines in the TOP500 supercomputer list. The resulting metacluster sits on the November 2002 list at position 233. A key differentiator for this cluster is that it was assembled, in terms of its software, from th