The PMS project: Poor man's supercomputer

Abstract We briefly describe the Poor Man's Supercomputer (PMS) project carried out at Eotvos University, Budapest. The goal was to construct a cost effective, scalable, fast parallel computer to perform numerical calculations of physical problems that can be implemented on a lattice with nearest neighbour interactions. To this end we developed the PMS architecture using PC components and designed a special, low cost communication hardware and the driver software for Linux OS. Our first implementation of PMS includes 32 nodes (PMS1). The performance of PMS1 was tested by Lattice Gauge Theory simulations. Using pure SU(3) gauge theory or the bosonic part of the minimal supersymmetric extention of the standard model (MSSM) on PMS1 we obtained 3$ / Mflops and 0.60$ / Mflops price-to-sustained performance ratio for double and single precision operations, respectively. The design of the special hardware and the communication driver are freely available upon request for non-profit organizations.