ORCA and the 7 ORCLETS are an 8 (Intel) processor parallel computer for use in coastal engineering computation (the first!). This small supercomputer shows that with a little perserverance, anybody can build their own supercomputer from off-the-shelf parts and at a fraction of the cost of a real computer! Eight Pentium II (300 Mhz)
computers from ASL Workstations are linked with fast Ethernet cards (3Com 3C905 100bTX) and a Bay Networks Baystack 350T 16 port Fast Ethernet switch. Each ORCLET has 128 Mb of 10 ns synchronous ram and a 6.4 Gb SCSI disk (Quantum Atlas on a Adaptec 2940UW SCSI card), while ORCA has a 9 G disk and a 32x SCSI -2 CD ROM drive. The operating system is Linux (RedHat 5.0).
ORCA has a 21in Iiyama monitor, driven by a Matrox Millenium II (AGP version) video card, and each ORCLET has a vga card (Cirrus Logic 5424), but no monitor. The machines are located on their own network, inaccessible to the outside world. ORCA, however, is connected to the CACR domain by a 10 Mb ethernet card.
