The PMS project: Poor Man’s Supercomputer

We briefly describe the Poor Man’s Supercomputer (PMS) project that is carried out at Eötvös University, Budapest. The goal is to develop 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 reach this goal 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 the PMS includes 32 nodes (PMS1). The performance of the PMS1 was tested by Lattice Gauge Theory simulations. Using SU(3) pure gauge theory or bosonic MSSM on the PMS1 computer we obtained 3$/Mflops priceper-sustained performance ratio. The design of the special hardware and the communication driver are freely available upon request for non-profit organizations.