As a theoretical physics group involved in computer simulation of statistical mechanical systems and materials properties, CPU-cycles are a commodity we are in general always short of. Besides using big national computing centers like the HLRZ in Juelich and the parallel computer and workstation facilities at the computer center of the University of Mainz ZDV , we are therefore constantly maintaining a strong installation of local computing power. Our newest addition is a cluster of workstations based on SuSE's SALT technology.
All nodes are dual-processor systems.
So far the cabinet has 2 slave nodes but we will upgrade this year with the fastest Intel chips available at a reasonable price. We plan to extend this installation to about 100 processors, which will constitute a compute power on a computer center scale. To feed these hungry monsters we are currently using the DQS queuing system, which also uses the cycles on the office desk machines.