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Gallery: the cluster in pictures
Hardware
The heart of the cluster
A computer cluster is a collection of individual computers which act together as a single bigger computer. The challenge is to split the work in such a way that the relatively slow communication between the individual computers is tolerable. When this is accomplished, clustering provides a flexible and relatively inexpensive way to create and maintain a high-performance supercomputer.

The Rybka Cluster, designed, owned and overseen by Lukas Cimiotti, is built from a large collection of electronic and infrastructural equipment, including twenty-nine motherboards, six hundred fifty-six gigabytes of RAM, five terabytes of solid-state disks, fifty-eight CPU sockets, and two hundred ninety-six physical Intel Nehalem cores. A gallery can be found here.

Due to the flexibility afforded by the clustering concept, the exact specifications of the Rybka Cluster change on a regular basis as our team makes improvements.