Our original but still operational Beowulf cluster was first brought online in April 2005. The original cluster had 48 nodes, and as of February 2024 there are now 14 nodes in operation after 18 years (12 of the old ones plus 2 new additions for fun.) The master itself died in June 2023, but it has been replaced with a spare Dell server.
In comparison, each of those original nodes included dual 2GHz 64 bit AMD Opteron 246 (K8 Sledgehammer) processors (single core, no hyperthreading) and 1GB of RAM (although now several nodes have been upgraded to 2GB of RAM from the RAM of non-functional nodes.) Most people currently have a lot more computational power in their smartphones than one of these cluster nodes. Each of the new AMD powered Dell servers have more than twice the computational power than all the remaining nodes of the Beowulf cluster combined.
This cluster was built as a farm of dual socket tower servers from Aspen Systems interconnected with a standard 1Gbps ethernet switch. It is still running Fedora Core 3 with the 2.6.9 Linux kernel compiled way back in November 2004. This cluster was primarily used to run CitCom finite element analysis by students and researchers working with Professor Slava Solomatov.