High Performance Computing (HPC) and Systems Engineering are part of our company DNA (our 5 core areas of expertise, to be exact), so needless to say, we really enjoy setting up our own hardware clusters. Recently we came across an opportunity to purchase some really great systems from an IT liquidator company. We couldn't pass it up... We ended up buying two NVIDIA Tesla S1070 1U servers, each with 4 NVIDIA Tesla C1060 GPUs, and 8 Dell 1950 III 1U servers, each with 2 quad-core Xeon 5400 CPUs and 16 GB RAM. The specification manuals of the NVIDIA system are available here and for the Dell system, here.

Despite cloud computing getting more popular, it is definitely useful to have your own in-house development HPC cluster for conducting work. Here's how we went about setting one up for ourselves.