West Virginia University

May 2003

West Virginia University (WVU) is located in Morgantown, West Virginia, just 70 miles south of Pittsburgh, Penn. On the main campus and four regional campuses, WVU serves 22,000 students. Because of its location in coal country, WVU has on its faculty several leading researchers in energy-related fields-areas such as power plant design, turbine construction, and fossil fuel research. The school also works cooperatively with researchers at other nearby energy research organizations-the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) and the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), a U.S. Department of Energy lab. The problems these researchers tackle require a great deal of computational horsepower-and WVU lacked sufficient computing resources for its faculty to fully participate. The challenge for WVU was to create an Intel architecture, Linux-based cluster that would be compatible with clusters at peer research institutions, allowing researchers to take advantage of shared computing resources. WVU built a Beowulf cluster of 28 Dell^TM PowerEdge^TM  rack-mounted servers and the Red Hat Linux operating system. The Dell Beowulf cluster provides generous computing muscle for solving research applications in energy and other fields.