In this chapter, you were introduced to the whole cluster concept regarding its hardware and interconnection. You were shown a working system configuration using only the minimally required amount of equipment and also some optional possibilities. A description of very basic housing including a cooling system was given as an example for a cheap yet nicely scalable possibility to mount the boards. You also learned how to build a cost-efficient power supply using a widely available ATX supply, and you were shown how to modify it to power several BBBs. Finally, you were introduced to the network topology and the purpose of network switches. A short description about the used storage system used throughout this book ended this chapter.

If you interconnect everything as described in this chapter, it means that you have created the hardware basis of a super computer cluster.

In the next chapter, you will be learning in detail how to install the operating system and how to configure master...