Step-by-Step Guide to Installing, Configuring, and Tuning a High-Performance Compute Cluster

This paper is a step-by-step guide based on the highly successful cluster deployment at National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. The cluster was built as a joint effort between NCSA and Microsoft, using commonly available hardware and Microsoft software. The cluster was composed of 450 x64 servers, achieving 4.1 teraflops (TFLOPs) on 896 processors using the widely accepted LINPACK benchmark.