Transportation of FINFLO to a cluster of PCs

Abstract: For a long time, the UNIX workstations have been superior against to the personal computers as far as computational speed is concerned. However, the gap between the speeds has been decreasing. Today’s personal computers are fast and relatively cheap, whereas the UNIX workstations are expensive. A comparison between the available personal computers and traditional engineering tools like UNIX workstations, servers and also the supercomputers is needed. In this report such a study is made for a cluster of PCs. It will be shown that with ideal cases the speed and parallel performance figures of a cluster of personal computers are competitive with those of the workstation. Main result: Benchmark runs in a cluster of Linux personal computers, and a comparison with different UNIX-platforms