The Fly Cluster

Recently, I acquired a computing cluster to facilitate analyzing large sequences as part of my bioinformatics research. Here are the specs:

14 1-GHz Pentium III processors
7 dual-processor machines with 2 GB of RAM each
roughly 120 GB of RAID disk storage
10+ GB of local scratch disk on each dual-processor box
100 MBit switched Ethernet interconnect
Linux OS

The cluster was built by Advanced Clustering Technologies, Inc.. In terms of computing bang per kilobuck, it was, as my mother is fond of saying, "cheap like borscht".

I call this system the Fly Cluster, not because I do a lot of work on fruit fly specifically but because I named the seven machines after famous Drosophila genes:

bicoid (acts as the master server, of course)
engrailed
hedgehog
kruppel (more properly, Krüppel)
reaper
Toll
wingless

What, you were expecting maybe the Seven Dwarfs?

Jeremy Buhler (jbuhler AT cse DOT wustl DOT edu)
Last Update: 8/27/2002