Building and Refining General Purpose Computing Clusters in an Emerging HPCOriented Research Environment

The increasing uptake of HPC, and cluster computing in particular, has led many people to develop creative solutions to the technical challenges that they encounter in the establishment of useful HPC facilities. Proven solutions from our experiences in acquiring and building research clusters for general purpose scientific use are presented to a number of such issues, ranging from the performance evaluation of vendor bids to matters of user management. Examples of the latter being techniques for limiting manual SSHing to compute nodes and the use of group accounts that empower user groups to take ownership of their specialized software.