THE FUNDAMENTALS OF BUILDING AN HPC CLUSTER Jeff Layton The King in Alice in Wonderland said it best, “Begin at the beginning ….” The general goal of HPC is either to run applications faster or to run problems that can’t or won’t run on a single server. To do this, you need to run parallel applications across separate nodes. Although you could use a single node and then create two VMs, it’s important to understand how applications run across physically different servers and how you administer a system of disparate physical hardware. https://sites.google.com/view/how-to-build-a-pc-now https://sites.google.com/view/how-to-build-a-pc-now With this goal in mind, you can make some reasonable assumptions about the HPC system. If you are interested in parallel computing using multiple nodes, you need at least two separate systems (nodes), each with its own operating system (OS). To keep things running smoothly, the OS on both nodes should be identical. (Strictly speaking, it doesn’t have to